FatFreeFilm the Indie Film Podcast
FatFreeFilm was one of the early podcasts, before everyone had a podcast enabled smartphone in their pocket. At the time podcasts were something I had to explain to most people. A precursor of FatFreeFilm was a podcast called FilmShots. A friend of mine named Dr. Jesse Rhines asked me what I thought about making what he called a VLOG, a video Blog. I got a book on making podcasts and we experimented by interviewing our friends and people we would meet in the industry. FilmShots was born as a podcast about indie film and raw food.
I became more interested in having just a podcast about indie film and Jesse was interested in wider topics, so FilmShots completed its cycle and my wife Kamala Lopez and I carried on with the newly named FatFreeFilm the indie film podcast.
FatFreeFilm was really my film school. I had studied theater in college, but never formally studied film, so what better way to learn about it than to go to those involved and talk with them about it? I could record it so others could join us too. Most of the time when I asked someone to be on the show they were a bit confused as to what it was exactly. We usually interviewed the person in their home or office. Our friend Justin Shumaker would mike us all up with wireless microphones and we’d just talk.
Podcasts gave us the opportunity to work more deeply than the traditional talk show and there was no time limit or censorship. What evolved over the 5 years that we did this podcast was some very in depth personal interviews with people involved in all aspects of film. It was also a critical time in cinema because the industry was making a move from celluloid film cameras to digital cameras. It was also a time when movies and television were moving to online streaming and the whole industry was being disrupted.
Somewhere around 2014 or so the FatFreeFilm site was hacked and destroyed. In early 2019 I was able to reconstruct brick by brick and it and it is all available again, along with the FilmShots episodes at https://www.fatfreefilm.com