We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sydney Welsh. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sydney below.
Alright, Sydney thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.
Choosing to go out and start a business for yourself is one giant risk; ultimately, starting a production company has been the biggest risk I have ever taken. You are investing your own capital and if it fails you have no one to blame but yourself. Therein lies the appeal for me while also being the reason for my anxiety-induced insomnia.
The film industry is historically male-dominated and I am a female filmmaker who loves to tell stories with women and women’s issues at the center of her films. As an artist, I believe that our stories become the most powerful when the screenplay gives the viewer a glimpse into the writer’s soul.
I aim to be transparent, unapologetic, and true to my feminine experiences in every one of my films. That becomes difficult when your script is being altered by men with very different life experiences. That’s not to say that I don’t allow men to proofread my scripts because I do but specifically with my feature film debut, I wanted the film to be unapologetically true to myself as a filmmaker. I didn’t want to answer to anyone (other than time and money), I wanted to build my own team of talented young creatives and in the immortal words of a four-year-old Sydney “I wanted to do it my own self.”
Straight out of college and full of hopeful ambition I started Death Rae Productions in 2019 with my first non-student short film that got derailed by the pandemic, (“My Heart is Your Heart”). For a while, I thought my dream was over but I pushed through and finished the short film with the footage we had, uploaded it to YouTube, and people loved it! So, I started looking at my feature film screenplays and decided it was time to take an even bigger risk.
In 2023, I legitimized my company Death Rae Productions LLC, crowdfunded, put my savings in to cover the rest, and made my first feature film “Summa Cum Loser” under my production company. Now unfortunately I cannot tell you whether or not it paid off financially because we are still waiting to hear back from film festivals before we can release it to the public. However, I can tell you that mentally it was the best thing I could have ever done for myself. I learned so much about who I am as a filmmaker and what I am capable of as a person. It’s usually the risk you are the most afraid to take that will set your soul on fire.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Sydney Welsh and I am the owner of Death Rae Productions LLC. Death Rae Productions is a production company that specializes in creating quality feature films, short films, and music videos with a low budget. I started my career in high school and community college in theatre and concert touring. This is where I picked up skills that would later help me when I transitioned into filmmaking at Cal State Fullerton.
As an avid do-it-yourselfer, I will often take on the role of director, writer, producer, casting director, costume designer, set builder, production designer, etc. Anything to make the low budgets we work with look as rich as possible on the screen. I view low-budget filmmaking as the most creative and fun job on the planet! At the end of the day, I just love what I do!
The thing I am most proud of is how we do our absolute best to run mentally and physically healthy on-set environments. As a producer, I try to only schedule eight-hour days and that is including set-up and strike for the crew. Early in my career, there would be days I would come home from set at four in the morning after working sixteen hours and I’d almost fall asleep at the wheel. I don’t want those unsafe practices in my business. As a woman in the film industry, I have seen the worst sides of this job that I love and my mission is to try and correct that for others. I always want my cast and crew to leave each workday excited to come back.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I made a 92-minute feature film (“Summa Cum Loser”…coming soon) with a budget of 30 thousand dollars. I know to some people that sounds like a lot (it did to me at first) but anything under 300 hundred thousand dollars is considered an ultra-low-budget film. Once you realize how fast that budget gets taken up you understand how much resilience it takes to be an ultra-low-budget film producer.
Once I started budgeting I realized that over half our budget right off the bat was going to cast and crew salaries. Because I was the writer, producer, director, production designer, casting director, set constructor, and too many other job titles to list all those salaries got taken out of the equation but salaries were still well over half our budget.
I called in as many favors as possible but when all was said and done there was no way we were going to be able to rent a coffee shop for the amount of days we needed. So, I built one in my living room for a tiny fraction of the cost to rent one. As the production designer this actually made me ecstatic because I had a blank slate to make it my own.
This is what independent ultra-low-budget filmmaking is…resilience. And I have to say (as a person who doesn’t brag very often) I am good at it. As the main person in charge on-set your entire day is spent finding creative solutions to problems. Filmmaking is a puzzle with every department being an equally important piece to the whole picture. Now just because a piece isn’t fitting doesn’t mean you throw it away it just means you have to find the correct way to make it work.
Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
The biggest piece of advice I can give for managing a team is understanding that no two humans are the same. I have been managing people since I was a teenager in many different job capacities. Through all of that experience, I learned that to manage people effectively you have to understand their individuality. The way you talk to one employee may not have the same effectiveness as another. I find it best to take some time to get to know your team and their individual needs along with how they like to communicate.
On any given day on set, I am working with ten very different personalities. On a department level (cast vs crew) there is already a very different personality split. Then you get into just individual differences. In general, it’s all about doing the work to figure out the best way to communicate with your people.
As for morale, treat people with respect. I like to say respect is a basic human right. I don’t believe in the sentiment that “respect is earned”. I believe that we should always respect our fellow humans until they give us a reason not to. There is another phrase I hear all too often in today’s society “Everyone is replaceable” and I could not disagree more! It is rare to find high-quality workers with great personalities and sometimes that has to be cultivated by the company. I believe it is the employers’ job to create a team that they don’t want to replace and to do their best to create an environment where people don’t want to leave either.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.deathraeproductions.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deathraeproductions?igsh=YTQwZjQ0NmI0OA%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@deathraeproductions?si=jisChOZHzbC2fT55
- Other: Summa Cum Loser Website: https://www.summacumloser.com/
Summa Cum Loser Insta: https://www.instagram.com/summacumloser?igsh=YTQwZjQ0NmI0OA%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
Summa Cum Loser TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@summacumloserfilm?_t=8oITfW5qQ5G&_r=1
Sydney Insta: https://www.instagram.com/sydney_rae_of_sunshine?igsh=OGQ5ZDc2ODk2ZA%3D%3D&utm_source=qr
Sydney Website: https://actresssydneywelsh.wixsite.com/sydneywelsh
Image Credits
Michael Sain, Sydney Welsh