 If you live in another part of the country or, like I did, another part of the world, both New York and Los Angeles seem like places where you can make your filmmaking dreams come true. But which one should you move to to make which kind of films? Today we're going to look at both cities' strengths and weaknesses and how you can follow your dreams to one of the hubs of filmmaking. Ten years ago I moved to the United States and I lived in LA, then New York and now back in LA. I spent about five years in both of those cities, made films in both of those cities and I've kind of come to a awareness of what works where and the best way to go about making movies in each city. A little disclaimer here, both LA and New York are giant metropolises of millions of people. Your experience will be totally different to mine, but there are some overarching trends or characters of both cities that might help you find the one that's the best fit for you. In 2009 I moved to LA. I spent, I had just optioned a script here to a big-time director and I felt like it was going to get made at any second. I felt that way because dozens of people had told me that, people in the production company, my manager, my agent, my lawyer, it was all just a couple of days away from being signed and my film was going to get made, I was going to become rich and famous. That happened month after month after month for almost two years and I kind of realized that people in LA at least don't really tell you what's happening. They tell you what they think you want to hear and I spent through most of my life savings without a green card, without really a visa just trying to wait for that moment where everything was going to happen and it never did. So I rolled up my sleeves and started trying to get my own career going, make my own films, raise my own finances, but I found it really difficult in LA. A cheap movie, a low-budget film in Los Angeles is a million dollars and over. This is because the hundred and two hundred million dollar movies are made here. So one percent of that is a million dollars and that's what people consider to be low-budget. I didn't know anyone in this country, literally no one, and I wasn't about to raise a million dollars. I mean maybe I could have come up with twenty or thirty thousand, but in LA there are very, very few productions of that size or that caliber. Everyone wants to go big or go home. So after a couple of years of trying that, I moved to New York and I found New York to be a totally different creature. I went from sitting on Venice Beach to being on the subway of New York City, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and being cheek to jar with ten million other people. It was exciting, stimulating, infuriating, kind of insane. But everyone in New York, or at least the people that I met as I started making films there, really wanted to work, really wanted to work on their careers, really wanted to do anything. A ten or twenty thousand dollar movie was totally on the cards. In fact, most people I knew in New York were making moves at that scale. Maybe because of Broadway and the theater scene in New York, there are a lot more actors that are willing to work on anything they can get their hands on. They're not waiting for the perfect role, they're not holding out for pilot season. They are really willing and able to get their hands dirty. I raised twelve thousand dollars on Kickstarter. I shot a web series that got a million views and on the basis of that, I was able to raise more money and make a feature film called Brooklyn Tide. We shot it for very little money in a very few weeks. But it meant that I had a feature film under my belt. So I moved back to LA with that and was able to get a lot more things happening here once I kind of cleared the bar of shooting my first feature, but also of having done a lot more work in the kind of more open, scrappier New York indie scene. I could easily have stayed in New York and made larger and larger feature films with the same people that I was working with out there. For me, it was more of a lifestyle thing. New York, for me, after six years became too intense. It just became too expensive. It wasn't my dream to live in New York. I was there out of convenience and it was just too much of a disconnect from how I want to live my life to spend another five years putting down roots somewhere that I didn't see myself long term. LA is a cheaper place to live if you're not right in the center of LA. It is much of your much more mobile. You can have a car here. You can be in nature and go hiking more. You can be at the beach. For me, it was just a better fit for the life I wanted to live. As a result, I figured I would make more films here and try and put down roots long term thinking that filmmaking is a decades long pursuit. It's not a multi-week or multi-year career. It is something that you have to do over a lifetime to get good at it and to make connections in it. Since the films I want to make are more LA films, they are larger budget thrillers. I figured I would put down roots here rather than New York, which is a more theater art film indie center of filmmaking. As I said before, everyone will have their own experience of these two cities, but it helps to be aware of the tendencies of both New York and LA's film scene and how the films you want to make might fit into that. Thanks very much for watching. Leave your questions in the comments. I'm happy to expand on these if anyone has any more queries. But as always, I will see you next time.