Day Job In The Way? You Can Still Make Your Movie

​There once was a 22 year old living in his first apartment with his fiancé. He was 1 of 8,000 people living in the town of DuBois, PA.

Each weekday, he clocked into his day job at 7am at the headquarters of Goodwill Industries of North Central PA. For eight hours he would design graphics, print banners, and then at 3:30pm, he'd clock out. For forty hours a week he did this and every two weeks he got a paycheck that would allow him to pay his bills, sleep under a roof, and take his fiancé out to the handful of restaurants in the small town.

​Millions of people do this, no biggie, right? Except he made a feature length movie at the same time.

Perhaps you're a filmmaker far away from Hollywood or anywhere that would allow for steady production jobs that could earn you a livable wage, i.e. DuBois, PA. You have rent to pay, groceries, toothpaste, a bunch of shit that requires a steady income.

I was fortunate enough to snag a full time media services position where I live, but not before I loaded logs into bulldozers in the middle of the woods and haggled people to buy Old Navy cards. Gotta get that money somehow and unless you're shooting weddings, professions with cameras are hard to come by in a lot of smaller areas.

But this micro budget approach to films could also be applied to city grinders as well. Bottom line is, day jobs eat up a lot of time - like the time that could be spent on that feature film or web series that you want to make.

Here's how I overcame that stress bomb and completed the feature survival drama Blood On The Leaves:

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