Independent Filmmaking: Secrets of the Craft

by Scott Shaw

In the follow-up book to his best selling text, Zen Filmmaking, prolific Independent Filmmaker Scott Shaw takes the reader behind the scenes of Indie Filmmaking and teaches the secrets of how to make a feature film, documentary, or music video in the most refined and expedient manner possible. He also teaches the reader the tricks of how to make a No to Low-Budget feature film look like it has a High-Budget price tag.Shaw leads the reader through all aspects of filmmaking begining with the screenplay, onto financing, casting, producing, directing, cinematography, and distribution.This book is full of insightful filmmaking techniques normally understood only by the advanced filmmakers. Plus, it presents numerous behind-the-scene stories of what occurs on indie film sets and how to make even the most trying of circumstances work to your advantage.

163 pages, Paperback

First published May 7, 2009

About the author

Born in the filmmaking capital of the world, Hollywood, California, Scott Shaw spent his early youth in South Los Angeles before returning to Hollywood for his adolescence. Shaw began writing poetry and long-form prose at a very young age. As his teenage years dawned he also added songwriting to his creative process.

Shaw was first published by poetry magazine in the 1970s. He continued forward and found an audience for his poetry and biographical literary fiction via journals and small presses from the 1970s into the 1980s.

By the end of the 1980s Scott Shaw had become a mainstay of martial art publications. This was based on his years of training in the Korean martial arts of Hapkido and Taekwondo, which began at the age of six years old. He also found that his writing on Yoga and Zen Buddhism were embraced due to his life-long emersion in mysticism.

Shaw, who has spent many years returning to, living, studying, and teaching in various geographical locations throughout Asia, has maintained his focus on this process and continues to be conduit for bringing Asian understandings to the Western mind. Hand-in-hand with his travels, Shaw emerged as a definitive photographer.

As the 1990s dawned, Shaw expanded his ability of capturing still images onto filmmaking. At this point he developed a new style of filmmaking that he titled, Zen Filmmaking. With Zen Filmmaking as his basis he moved forward and has made numerous films based upon this ideology.

To date, Scott Shaw has witnessed his writings published on a vast array of subjects. He maintains his focus on Eastern mysticism and the martial arts while continuing to break new ground with his works of poetry and literature.