About The Site

This site is about the making of a short, amateur film called “Fictional Fiction”. You can find news, podcasts and videos about our thoughts on amateur film making and how the production is proceeding using the links above. This site is intended as a guide for those interested in amateur film making.

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About Us

Scott and JohnWe're Sympodius Studios. Never heard of us? That's probably because we're just a couple of guys trying to make a low-budget film without any experience. The plan is to document the whole thing so that other people can see how we did it. That way, everyone can have a go and learn from our mistakes. And, on the off chance that we succeed, all the production files for the film will be released to the public so that they can see how we did it.

Our production company, Sympodius Studios, is just a name. All it consists of is the two of us: John and Scott. We're two students from Glasgow in Scotland. Not film students mind you: Neither of us have any real experience with film making, it just looked cool. Also, since we're students, we have no money. And, since we have no money, our film has no budget. The whole idea is just built on hopes and candy floss.

We're trying to make a film because we think it'll be fun. But we also think it would be great if anyone could make a film. With blogging and podcasts, people have discovered talents that they didn't know they had. And that is largely because it didn't cost them much to find out. The problem with film is that it isn't quite there yet. It still costs loads of money and most people don't have that. Then again, studios don't want to give money to someone with no experience. So the only way to find out if you can make a good film is to go to film school, work your way up in the industry and someone might give you a shot. It's an awful big gamble if you turn out not to have the talent, so people wouldn't do it unless they are really committed. That means there could be loads of Steven Spielbergs and Peter Jacksons out there that were too sensible to take the risk.

However, things are slowly starting to change. Free and accessible technology is appearing that means people require less money and technical expertise to realise their ideas. The amateur musician is now capable of producing professional recordings in their own bedroom and the writing hobbyist can publish on the internet with no knowledge of web design. Technology has become accessible, making things easier for people rather than more complicated. Amateur film production is getting more advanced but is still difficult to learn. There is no consolidated information about how a large scale production was made on the cheap. We aim to make a fairly advanced amateur film and show how we did it at every stage of the production. Once the film is complete, we will also release it (and all the raw files we used in the production) as open source. This simply means that you will have access, at no cost, to the digital files that we made the film with to learn from.

In carrying out this project, we hope to show you that making films can be fun. But more importantly, we want you to see that if we can do it, you can do it.

You can contact us via email if you have any questions:

Podcast

We produce a weekly (more or less) podcast about making films, our film's progress and just about films in general. You can find out more about each show from our podcast page as well as download each episode. You can also subscribe using the options below:

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