• We wanted to make a movie in Butte, Montana
• We wrote an "Exquisite Corpse" style story set in Butte via e-mail. See the first page of the diary
• We made a trip to Butte, and while there started work on a Treatment (our film story written out like a short story). On this trip we also made a trailer (you can watch it as a streaming video from our Movie page.)
• We did more research by chasing some web links
• We transformed the treatment into a script . The script was written based on the traditional form of a silent film scenario
• We found actors and went out to Butte to make the movie. You may read all about it in our filmmaking diary
• I holed myself up in an edit suite and edited our twenty plus hours of video into a 98 minute feature over a period of about three months
• We held a sneak preview screening at Mayslack's bar in Minneapolis (December 8, 1999).
• We presented the film in Butte Montana at the Irish Times pub, March 15, 16 and 17, 2000.
• The movie debuted on ifilm.com in April 2000.
• I cut 10 minutes out of it, making it a slimmer 88 minutes, in July 2000.
• We had a gala screening in Butte on June 8, 2001 in the auditorium of Montana Tech.
• You will buy a copy so that we can pay our credit card bills.

Copyright © 1999 John Akre

http://www.sloppyfilms.com/buttemagic/making.html