About Side/Effect
Every artist’s journey starts somewhere. The first steps I’ve taken on my journey to explore visual media started in my native Hungarian hometown of Kaposvár. After more than a decade of moving away, I decided to return, create and give something to the people here that resonates with them. My plans with Side/Effect was to challenge my skills as producer and create something from literally nothing. Not knowing a single filmmaker or having a single piece of production gear, I embarked on a quest to build a crew and create a cost-efficient webseries.
The objectives
With Side/Effect, my goal was to prove that I am experienced enough as a producer to manage the complete production process of the series, which included screenwriting, direction and post-production (visual FX and motion graphics design).
The challenges
While at first, recruiting a crew and actors from the local university seemed to solve most staffing problems, I encountered several challenges. One of them was several key actors cancelling at the last moment. I overcame this with the help of my screenwriting experience and after several instances of overnight complete script rewrites, I managed to save the project. Additionally, I learned several valuable lessons regarding the selection of crew and the supervision of all production processes which was made possible by the challenge of creating the entire project from scratch.
The results
While the project did suffer from the challenges of an inexperienced cast and crew, we have managed to reach a steady viewership and were given the opportunity to screen the series as a short film at a prestigious cultural center to full house of 300 guests. This opened up new opportunities both from creative and entrepreneurial perspectives.