ABSTRACT
To an increasing extent, the little fat girl has now started singing. The number of films produced on low and micro budgets has been growing exponentially from the turn of the twenty-first century onwards.3 This growth has of course been fuelled by the arrival of digital technology that promises new opportunities for such films. This chapter explores, in part, some of the technical developments that are actively changing the means of film production (though the author warns that such changes are constant and quickly outdated); and goes on to discuss the implications for filmmakers and how the relationships between ‘old’ and ‘new’ and ‘production’ and ‘finance’ can benefit from sharing knowledge, creating alignments and by all sectors being forced to take a very hard look at how they can go about their work with more ‘discipline’. Badly made films can find a seriously committed audience, while fabulouslooking, technical masterpieces can fail dismally at the box office. And crucially, just because a filmmaker ‘can’ – thanks to the advent of digital economics – does not answer ‘what’, ‘why’ or, crucially, ‘who for?’
