Tips on filmmaking from Colin Gunn

Colin Gunn, who has made five films, says he is always learning about filmmaking, but he also has some advice for anybody thinking about venturing into the field: Know your subject, learn from the best, and work hard.

“If you’re going to make a film, really know your subject,” says the Scotsman now living in Texas. “All the films that we are making and have made, we have thought about them for years before we actually picked up a camera and started filming. There may be opportunities that come your way that allow you to just go film something and then potentially use it, but a lot of thought goes into a film—how it’s going to look, who’s going to be in it—long before you actually film.”

He also urges would-be filmmakers to watch quality movies.

“We’re learning all these tricks that Hollywood has and using them for our purpose,” Colin says. “We feel Christian filmmaking should have a different identity from the way the world does it, but we’re learning from the best.”

Rather than “tricks,” though, much of filmmaking is about hard work over long spans of time. While the Gunn family traveled in a big yellow school bus for three weeks for IndoctriNation, the film actually took four years to make from conception to distribution.

“You have a large period of preproduction where you do planning, and it’s very unglamorous,” Colin says. “Filmmaking is pretty much email and phone calls for most of it, and there’s a small amount of time where you’re filming. You want to get everything set up so that your time of filming is very productive.”

Then, once you’ve got your footage, comes postproduction, “where you get all this footage and you weave it together in the editing stage and you add music and you do narration and you’re writing all the time, you’re writing multiple versions of a script to get the narration right and to get the whole message to come together.”