 Hey, this is The Crimson Engine. My name is Rubidium. Today we are looking at whether or not you need to move to Los Angeles to get serious about filmmaking. So the short answer to this question is yes, but the long answer is it's complicated. A little bit about my background. I moved here in 2009 from Australia. I then moved to New York in 2010 and was there for six years before moving back here in 2016. So I've kind of spent time between Burbank and Brooklyn. Both of them are really great places to live. Both of them are very different. Both of them have a lot of opportunities but a lot of challenges and I get asked this a lot whether or not people actually need to be living in Los Angeles if you want to be serious about making films. From my perspective, I felt like I did. You know, Hollywood isn't really a geographic location anymore. It's sort of a state of mind. It's a crossroad of talent, finance, distribution, publicity and it exists all around the world. But a lot of people come here to meet, to exchange, to get things made because this is where everyone else is. So I felt like to make the films that I wanted to make, which were genre thrillers and bigger budget films, I felt like I had to be in the US. I found it really hard to get a first feature made here in LA because a small budget LA movie is like a million dollars whereas a small budget New York film is like fifty thousand dollars. So I moved to New York. I found there was a lot less barriers to entry there. There was a lot more hungry actors that are used to theater and Broadway sort of stuff. So you don't need to pay them as much. Not all of them are in the Screen Actors Guild. You can get a lot more done with a lot less money in New York. But once I made my first feature and wanted to get a bigger movie made, I ended up flying back and forth to LA almost every month. So I decided to move out here and it's been great so far for that. There are plenty of people that get multi-million dollar budget feature films made from Alaska and from Texas and from Georgia and Atlanta and New Mexico and just for where I felt more comfortable putting down routes and making connections long term, LA was the place for me. That brings up an interesting point. Back when I lived in Australia, I felt like I could just come here for a week and make some contacts and fly home and I found pretty quickly it doesn't work like that. People want to know you here for the long haul before they invest their time and effort in working or getting to know you. It's very hard. You may get a meeting here and there but really it's much, much easier to get things started because things just tend to move very slowly. As far as supporting yourself from other film work while you work on your pet projects or your passion projects, there is a lot of film work in LA. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of other filmmakers trying to get that same work. You have to compete for that stuff. If you look on the Los Angeles Craigslist, you'll see dozens of cinematographers with red cameras or Canon cameras or even some Alexis who are willing to work for $200, $300 a day shooting music video for $500. There are a lot of hungry, talented people in Los Angeles and you need to be just as hungry and just as talented if you want to compete with them. Having said that, I found it easier than New York to get work here. The film industry is much more pervasive here in New York. There's so many other industries. There's Wall Street. There's fashion. There's advertising and here the sort of film industry is so central that I feel like other people come here to get jobs made from other countries and there's a lot of work for that reason. Take it with a grain of salt but there are also a lot more YouTubers here. This seems to be the place that if you're big on social media, you move to LA for whatever reason, I'm not sure, but I found that I've met a lot more other YouTubers and people who are active in social media here in Los Angeles. Living in LA can be very cheap because LA sort of sprawls out and you can live kind of 20 or 30 or 40 minutes drive from Hollywood and get in and out if you have a car and pay much cheaper rent than you would in New York. With the same amount of money, the standard of living or the quality of life here, I felt is much higher. That may just be me though. I much prefer being outside, being in the mountains than I do being in the kind of concrete canyons of New York City. As far as my quality of life, Los Angeles is much higher. I'm sure different people feel different ways. If you're coming to Los Angeles to work, to develop your career, I would say you probably need about six months to 12 months worth of savings because it can take a really, really long time to get anywhere and get things done. Maybe more than most other places. I think, I don't know why, but the LA culture seems to be very much one of wait and see and we'll see what happens. It isn't a go-go, let's get it done culture like New York City or Melbourne for that instance. Things do happen, they happen on a big scale. It just takes a lot of time. So be prepared to do a lot of free stuff, build connections, eat a lot of rum and noodles, live out in Sherman Oaks or Van Nuys. If you can hook up something to do before you come, even better and land on your feet, that would be my advice. My final piece of advice would be be prepared to do anything when you get here. Even PA, even if you're a 40-year-old feature director who has no contacts in LA, if you come here and you can be a first AD or a PA on a set, you're going to meet people, you're going to build connections, you're going to get yourself out there. I think the most self-defeating thing that I did was sort of like just sit around Venice Beach and wait for the opportunities to find me. It just doesn't work. You need to you need to hustle, but also LA is happily moving along without you. If you turn up, don't expect it to fall at your feet. You need to put the work in and just get yourself out there so you're making connections and rubbing up against other people and other things so that things actually happen for you. That would be my biggest piece of advice. Hope that helped someone out there. It is a really tough journey. It is not for the faint-hearted, but it is incredibly rewarding. It's an amazing city. I love this town. If anyone's thinking about it, totally do it. Just know what you're getting yourself into. Thank you very much for watching. I will see you next time.