Make Your Movie brought together students, alums and emerging creatives for a conversation at Alumni House about how independent films actually get made. The event explored the relationships, persistence and resourcefulness that carry a project from idea to screen.
Student filmmakers Sean Nam and Dylan Coty, from UC Berkeley’s Cinematic Arts & Production (CAP) Studios, sat alongside Marisa Guterman ’10 and Keith Gerchak of Double G Films. Though they were all in different stages of their careers and working on different scales, the same underlying truth threaded through everything they shared: filmmaking is relational work.
Guterman and Gerchak discussed the twelve-year journey behind Lost and Found in Cleveland, a comedy inspired by the world of Antiques Roadshow. Twelve years is long enough for the industry to reshape itself multiple times. A pandemic. Strikes. Market consolidation. Shifts in streaming. Distribution recalibrated. Marketing reinvented. Funding raised, then raised again.
There was no gloss-over about how hard those twelve years were.
Cleveland itself became part of the filmmaking process. Local businesses and investors contributed. The city rallied around a story that reflected pieces of itself. The project did not simply exist in Cleveland. It was built with Cleveland.
Gerchak spoke candidly about sending cold emails and following every lead, even the unlikely ones. There wasn’t a pre-existing path laid out. There was forward motion created through persistence. Over and over.
On the student side, Nam and Coty described CAP Studios as both a classroom and laboratory. They have nearly forty short films between them, rotating through every role, directing one semester and running sound the next. They learned not from theory alone, but from the friction of production: tight timelines, limited resources, creative disagreements and collective problem-solving.
The gap between campus and industry surfaced early. Students discussed the challenges of working in the film industry outside of Los Angeles. Panelists reflected that geography matters, but it does not define the ceiling. The tools are more accessible than they have ever been. A camera sits in every pocket. Editing software is no longer gated behind studio walls. The entry point into storytelling is radically different than it was even a decade ago.
Guterman reframed filmmaking in entrepreneurial terms. Each film is its own startup. There is seed money. There are legal documents. There are decks and investor conversations. There are sponsors and strategic partnerships. There is a business spine beneath the creative heart.
The statistics shared were sobering. Most films never receive distribution. Most startups fail. Theatrical release in 500 theaters nationwide is increasingly rare for independent films.
An audience comment cut through the romance of storytelling and reminded everyone of the sheer labor involved. Independent filmmaking requires stamina. It requires thinking sideways when the front door closes. It requires pitching bridge clubs and corporate sponsors with equal conviction. It requires continuing when studios say no.
And yet the conversation never spiraled into defeatism. Instead, it turned toward responsibility. If a story matters, then the work is to build the ecosystem around it.
For many of the filmmakers that meant raising funds more than once. It meant offering actors equal pay and terms to make casting possible within an independent budget. It meant bringing on corporate sponsors to support marketing and post-production. It meant leading distribution efforts directly rather than waiting for a traditional studio pathway to appear.
In response to the panel, students in the audience wanted to know: How do you know which idea is the one worth making? What happens after graduation? How do you begin when the industry feels unstable?
Nam spoke about telling the story only you can tell. Coty emphasized making things now, even imperfectly or experimentally. Both acknowledged uncertainty without dramatizing it. There was something reassuring about that.
The conversation around mentorship also expanded beyond hierarchy. A mentor can be a peer, a collaborator, or even city official. A friend who reads your script and pushes back on your weakest scene. Access does not always arrive through prestige. Sometimes it emerges through proximity and initiative.
Hope came up repeatedly, but not in a decorative way. It surfaced as something active. Hope as effort. Hope as strategic thinking. Hope as the willingness to keep building relationships even when outcomes are unclear.
Make Your Movie was framed as an invitation. Not to romanticize the process. Not to underestimate the work. But to begin.
Photo Credit: Don Collier
