I want to start making movies as a hobby, but I need a plan. Where do I start from?

You can get all the gear to shoot movies on your own for a couple thousand dollars. If you have a job with that Masters in Mechanical Engineering, that shouldn't take you too long. Here's what you need: 1) Camera I recommend the Canon T2i with the relatively inexpensive 18-135mm  and 50mm f/1.8. The zoom lens will give you all the range you need, and the 50mm lens is fast (can be used in low light), which will help you a lot when shooting interiors. Get a tripod. A good one is nice, but not necessary. You might want to consider a cheap shoulder mount (or build one from PVC). You can get all of this for less than $800, especially if you go used/refurb. 2) Sound The Zoom H4N is the standard for super-indie sound recording, though there are some less expensive alternatives you can research. A decent shotgun mic and boom pole will really help, but I know people who have had great results with just the built-in Zoom mics. ALWAYS GET ROOM SOUND and your lackluster dialogue recording can be mixed until it is clear. Lav mics are a luxury, but very useful. 3) Editing Hopefully you already have a decent computer. If not, you need something with a quad core processor, dedicated (Nvidia) video card, and at least 16 gb of RAM. You can build your own for less than $1000. A decent monitor sure helps, but it's not necessary at first (you can test color, etc, on your TV). Then you'll want to get editing software. I recommend Adobe Premiere Pro, which is part of the Creative Suite. Now they are subscription based, so you can get started for $30/month or so. This includes software to do Automatic Dialogue Replacement and score mixing, as well as After Effects, which can be great for removing unwanted background objects and making beautiful titles. Now all you have to do is learn how to make movies! Start by getting a subscription to http://Lynda.com. They have great tutorials that can teach you how to edit your video and sound without ruining everything. You need to get good at cutting, but after that it's basically a question of how badass you want to be. Learn your camera's controls and optimal settings for video (easy). If you don't have any experience with photography, look up pictures that you like and copy them. Practice moving focus smoothly within frame. It won't take you long to get the skill and comfort that you need to handle the camera. Go to http://dailyscript.com and read a screenplay every day. Start writing your own. I recommend starting with less than a page; think about the best story you can make with only ten shots. Then try three pages. Then five. Learn how to outline. Write three short scripts for every one you shoot. Write full-length scripts and revise/rewrite them until they are good. Keep shooting, keep writing. Focus on meeting actors and film wannabes in your area. This is a lot easier if you live in a town with a university. Rinse. Repeat. Honestly, a lot of your friends are going to burn out on you, even if you can get them to show up. Making movies is a much more time-consuming, boring, and often difficult process than most people expect or are really ready to deal with. A couple of them might love it. You can also make new friends, right? Find some consistent collaborators. Making movies is not an easy thing to do, but I imagine getting a postgraduate engineering degree wasn't a cakewalk, either. It really just depends how much you want to do it. One final note: There's a lawyer here in Boise, Idaho, who has shot something like four or five feature films. None of them are very good, but damn, that's a career's worth of films for a lot of Hollywood directors. If he can do it, so can you. If you can do it better than him, you may end up leaving engineering for a life in pictures!

Wow.... Ok...let's start slowly... Take some courses on filmmaking/videography. Most community colleges have some programs at some levels concerning these fields. Take copious notes Go to your local library and check out as many books as you can about filmmaking and the filmmaking process. Read them them cover to cover and take more notes. Rent some videos about filmmaking. Watch them thoroughly. Take even more notes. This should take you from 3 months to 1 year. Within that time frame, you'll be able to determine if : The film industry is an industry in which you want to work. If it is an industry which has jobs which you can do If it is something that you wish to invest significant amounts of time in doing. I understand that you want to do this as a "hobby." But this hobby can cost you tens of thousands of dollars (or more) and cause you no end of personal and financial discomfort if you go about it in the wrong manner. Some examples: You are making a micro-budget/low-budget film. Someone gets injured (or worse) killed. What do you do? Do you have the necessary insurance? Have you indemnified yourself against personal liability? To what degree? You are making a film. Your story ( you said that you had a script) seems new and original to you. Against all odds, your film becomes a minor hit and it is shown at film festivals around the country. Distributors are interested and along comes someone who claims that you "stole" their idea. What do you do? Did you? Do you even know this person? You are making a film. The police drive by and stop. They ask you what you are doing. They then ask if you have a permit to film in public. Do you? Did you apply for one? Is it necessary where you plan on filming? Can you retroactively apply for one if you did not? Are you going to get a citation and a fine for filming without one? You are making a film. You have gathered all the necessary performers. But wait...did you check their IDs? Are any of them underage? Are you sure? Are they legal to work in the US? Have you filled out all of the correct documentation for them to be working? Are you going send out 1099 forms at the end of the year for their taxes? Have they signed contracts? Are the contracts solid? What if they want more money? You are making a film. During the filming, some property gets damaged or stolen. Do you have insurance? If not, why not? Who's going to pay for the damages or for replacement? What if they sue? Do you have an attorney? Do they have experience in this field? What if your attorney says "just settle?" Do you have the money for that? The above is an exceptionally short list of things which can happen just making a micro-budget/low-budget film. Most people don't concern themselves with half of them and then they find that it costs them far more than if they had simply considered them from the beginning. Why didn't they considered them? Because they didn't know anything about them. You state that you are an engineer. That means that you have had at least some training in the basics of planning. Would you attempt to assemble a machine without first creating a plan for how you would do it? Some designs? Some plan for the budget required? No, you wouldn't. Well...you wouldn't if you didn't expect to be designing any more machines, that is. I have worked behind the scenes on roughly 23 productions. I have worked with other people who have attempted to begin about 15 more, All were micro-budget/low-budget productions here in the Midwest.All had varying degrees of problems, And to date, NONE have been anything more than vanity pieces, shorts or complete failures. And these were productions undertaken by people who had either been to film school or who had training in film or television production. They had been involved with productions before.They had equipment, money and they knew people. And they still had numerous issues. Again, you seem to want to go to the moon before you have designed and built a rocket to do so. My advice: start slowly and carefully. Get some education in what needs to be done, Decide if it is something that you can do. Then..get involved in your local film community ( place ads on Craigslist and in local alternative papers). Work on several small productions, Get to know people Do whatever needs to be done and observe carefully. Listen to what is said. And learn. After a few years, you'll know some of the ropes, who to do deal with and who to stay away from, and whether or not you like this as a hobby or perhaps as a career or a business. Good Luck

You're gonna get a lot of different answers for this. Here's my advice. What camera you have doesn't really matter. A DSLR would be great, but if you don't have one, even a smartphone will do. The camera is less important than most amateurs assume. Don't worry about getting a great cast. You can start auditioning people for your projects down the road. To start, just focus on fun projects you do with your friends that give you some fundamentals. I'm talking short videos, be they scripted or improvised or some combination of the two, that none of you take too seriously. The point is for you, the aspiring filmmaker, to get yourself acquainted with the basic filmmaking process. Write a script, make a shot list, find locations, shoot, edit, etc. Don't be shy about your ideas or aspirations. If you are shy about them, you will never fully devote yourself to them. You need to be proud and confident of what you want to do. Filmmaking can be a very fun activity, and I think your friends will be willing to help you. You can try to convince them by buying them meals during the project, putting their names in the credits, etc. People tend to think of filmmaking as exciting work. Use that to your advantage. You don't have any money, and that is fine. Make the best creative use of what you have. You will not be able to afford expensive permits to film at many locations, so work around it. Shoot in your own home, in your yard, in friends homes (with permission, obviously), etc. Guerrilla style. Use what you have at home or shop thrift stores for props. You can make a great film for pocket change if you're just smart about it.

I'd recommend first taking the script you have, and setting it aside for something other than your first film... You don't need a high-end camera (just have enough light).  You don't need money (if you're just posting something to Youtube).  But you do need to write a script to accommodate your limitations. Script-writing is by far the easiest part of filmmaking.  It's fun and you don't need to coordinate with anyone, or pay for anything, to get a script done.  But turning the script into a movie is where all the hard work is.  You need creativity.  You need a plan.  You need some form of camera.  You need a computer with some form of video editing software (which could be free).  Then you need the drive to learn technical details, how to plan, and how to direct.  That requires some reading.  The more you read, the better prepared you'll be.  And the better the end result. I'm hoping you're okay with just making a movie, and not having hopes and dreams of this movie being decent quality.  You're going to screw up your first time.  If you had money, you'd have experienced crew members who could help you create a good quality movie, but you don't, so you'll have to learn yourself. As far as your cast... if you want anyone to watch your movie till the end, you'll either need real actors, or you'll need friends that are not camera shy and are exactly like the characters they portray.  Don't expect non-actors to be able to act.  They can't. You ought to keep your first film to a couple of minutes..just something short and cute.  Get your feet wet.  Don't involve more than 3 actors.  Maybe you even want to do something like a voiceover narrative.  Record the sound later.  Just get out there and make some sort of film from end to end, and get the thing on Youtube. If you do start to invest money, I'd say the first thing to buy is a good recorder, like a Zoom, and plan your shoots for clean sound... in quiet places. If you’re interested in my other filmmaking related answers, check out my blog, https://directorsnotes.quora.com

Stop procrastinating and looking for creative u-turns. Grab your phone, you have a camera on that. Choose actors from a free casting website such as star now. Pick a date to shoot. Film them doing the scene with your phone. Edit the footage on a free video editor or trial of a paid editor. Done. You could have this film completed within a week. Stop planning and do it. Save the planning for your 20th short film: once you have experience and will need the planning as your ability has earned it. Engineering is all about planning and risk reduction. Let that slide to begin with. You can come back to that later.

If you haven't started doing vlogs, my advice is to start there. Then, add some people to your vlog and start getting time behind the camera, rather than in front of it. This way, you'll learn the quirks of both positions. Now, idk if you're interested in documentaries or entertainment; your interest will dictate what you need to do next. In either event, start building contacts with others who have already been in your position.

I know exactly what you’re going through, believe me. I’m a soon-to-be college freshman trying to figure this out all on my own.From my experience, people that I’ve met — friends, family, even random acquaintances — are surprisingly thrilled by the idea of starring in a short film, even if it’s shot on an iPhone and will be up on YouTube within a few weeks to a meager 10 or 15 views, tops. Now obviously, don’t expect acting to be top-notch. But at least you may have people who want to try, and if you establish yourself as a director figure — or at least give the appearance of knowing what you’re doing — people will work with you.Which leads me to another point: plan. And then plan some more. That is the one regret I always have after each short film I make, and one I expect to have after every project. With my most recent short, for example, I started bouncing off ideas between me and my sister, who co-produced, for several weeks. Nothing concrete, just abstract. Write or draw them down on paper, and eventually you may start connecting some ideas together to form cohesive plotlines. Boom, you have your foundation.Scout out some locations near you. Don’t be too critical of what they must be as according to the story. For my most recent project, the initial plan was to shoot the outdoor scenes in a green, foresty environment. Problem? I live in Phoenix — desert for hundreds of miles. I was in constant denial of changing the location in the scene to fit what I had available (dirt, and some cacti) until I discovered a park close to home with about a quarter-mile of actual greenery hidden from the public eye.Again, be open to constant change. It is inevitable.From there you can procrastinate, overthink, regress and progress, doubt yourself, and then finally, craft together a story that you are certain will be panned by everyone in the audience.Then, once you’ve had your fair share of self-loathing, channel it into the production phase and take chances. Your story feels a little lacking? Take out a scene and put it in the beginning instead. Need original music? Find a computer with GarageBand and experiment with it. Have a scene that’s been sabotaged by highway traffic and you can’t reshoot in time? Use it to the story’s credit.Basically, get creative because the sky’s the limit!And once you’ve driven yourself insane: show it off. YouTube is a good start. And from there link it to your other social media platforms. And if you’re really lucky, your school might be part of a film festival. Why not submit it there? You have nothing to lose.•TL;DR Don’t be afraid to start. Even just a little bit! Once you sit down and are adamant enough to shoot your short film, you will have the mental momentum you need to get weird and creative. Don’t be afraid to test your boundaries, because they are the only things keeping you from success — no matter how you choose to define that. Expect resistance from your peers, from your resources, and especially from yourself. But once you’ve reached your goal it will be very satisfying to look back on the progress you’ve achieved.•My short film, with my sister acting and co-producing and me generally doing the rest (shot on the LG V10 and edited with Adobe Premiere Pro CS6):My go-to places for inspiration, education, and information:https://www.youtube.com/user/DSLRguide - (fantastic for beginners, and those on low or nonexistent budgets)https://www.youtube.com/user/D4Darious - (for those who are more experienced in the industry)https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJkMlOu7faDgqh4PfzbpLdg - (insightful video essays and the occassional spark of ideas)https://www.ted.com/ - (if you don’t know what this is you have been living under a rock. Also accessible on Netflix)