In 2005, Paul Harrill began the Self-Reliant Film blog to promote personal, regional, and DIY filmmaking. In 2009 Ashley Maynor began contributing regularly. The blog was retired in 2015 after ten years. During its time was listed as one of indieWire’s “Blogs We Love” and was named part of Film Festival World’s The Essential Film Blog Reader.

In 2018, with the transition to a new site design and hosting service, some internal links were broken and the often-insightful comments were regrettably lost. Such is the way of the Web.

The archive of posts, preserved here, is a snapshot of microbudget filmmaking resources and reflections, 2005-2015. Some of it is horribly dated, of course, but some remains as relevant today as when it was posted.

Below are some of the highlights:

First Post: Declaration of Principles.

Interviews: Interviews with filmmakers like Joe Swanberg and Caveh Zahedi, among others.

DIY Film Projects: This page assembles a number of DIY projects that were written about on the Self-Reliant Film blog. It also includes “6 Thoughts on DIY Projects”, to-date the single most popular post made in the 10 years that the blog was active. Some of the projects are a little out of date or the links are broken, but this is still a useful page to get you started on crafting tools for filming.

So You Wanna Go To Film School, Part 1 and Part 2: A discussion of whether or not film school might be right for you, how to search for the right program, and strategies for applying.

©opy®ight: A Few Helpful Links: Several resources on how to register a work, best practices surrounding Fair Use, Creative Commons, and how to search the copyright/public domain status of works.

Storyboard Templates: Just what it sounds like.


What To Do When Your Hard Drive Goes Soft: Some tips for saving a failing hard drive (Mac OS users only).

Super-8 Resources: Tips and links regarding working with Super-8, especially home movies.

The full archive of posts Self-Reliant Film blog can be found here.

You can also search the Blog Archive (Nov 2005 - Dec 2015) :