My chief struggle was to make Olympia 's end as happy as I could. Hire professional actors who have done work your writer-director and you love. In general, professional actors do much better work than amateurs, and most of them are so grateful to work that they work cheaply. Hire a professional director of photography whose work you and the writer-director like. The Heidi Fleiss Story .
Many independent films go cheap on the sound.
Audiences will accept odd, jumpy images, but not bad sound. Don't shoot outdoors at night unless you want a dark, neo-documentary look. An independent film can't afford the lights necessary to make outdoor night scenes look anything other than menacing. Don't have the writer-director edit his or her own film. Make him or her work with an editor whose work the writer-director likes, and who, again, is experienced.