We were once a bunch of guerrillas, guerrilla filmmakers that is. Much like you, we struggled with all the little details that you need to keep track of when producing your film. We had to do it all, and we needed software that could help us manage it all. But, alas, there was nothing out there that fit. The ones that came close either didn’t integrate with one another, were clunky, buggy, or hard to use, and most were way beyond our budget. We wanted every last penny to go into production value, not into software.
Since we were software programmers by day (hey, we had to pay the rent) and filmmakers by night (and weekends), we knew we could build BETTER software. So, during pre-production and production on our own film, we started writing little modules, little databases to keep track of all those little details. The first one we ever did was the profit-sharing module. We needed investors. We needed to tell investors what they would get back for their investment dollar. We wanted to give points to key crew & cast members and we needed some way to calculate it all so that, at the end of the day, we didn’t completely lose our shirts.
One thing led to another, and the next thing we knew, we had created modules for tracking cast & crew, rehearsal schedules, locations management, basic budgeting, scheduling, and expense tracking. When we started getting dailies back from the lab after the first few days of shooting, we were writing all of our notes about all of the takes on yellow legal pad. That got really boring, really fast, so we built the editing notes module.
After another late night of editing, the director poured over his notes in the database. It was madness, all of it. What was missing from that scene? A reshoot was just out of the question. We don’t have enough money, he lamented. And then, a light bulb appeared over his head, a dollar sign floating inside of it, as he heard that familiar sound… Ding!
That’s it! There’s got to be other filmmakers out there who can use this stuff!
So, that’s what happened. We took a look at the modules we created and thought there were probably lots of other filmmakers out there who might like to use them too. The modules weren’t sea-worthy enough for the rest of you at that point, so we decided to put the film project on the back burner and spent the next year and a half programming, refining, adding more features, and testing the software. Finally, in July of 2002, a Gorilla was born.
Since then, more modules were added, expanded and refined. Now, Gorilla is a full-suite of invaluable tools for producing films and videos. We are proud that our software is used by so many filmmakers and we were pleasantly surprised to find that in addition to independents, many of our customers include TV producers, documentary filmmakers, animators and studio producers. We have people in places like Canada, France, Australia & India using our software. And people are using Gorilla to make films from Iowa all the way to Istanbul. It’s certainly not what we set out to do in the beginning, but it’s been a wonderful, rewarding experience and we look forward to doing so much more.
