As big budget filmmaking has gone through wholesale changes in the past 20 years, so has the way indie films are optioned, produced and ultimately marketed to the world at large.

Is a film still a film if it were never shot on film? That may sound like a question best suited for a Dr. Seuss book; but it is a question worth asking these days.

As we come to the close of another year, we here at Film Slate Magazine have decided to give you, the reader, what you clamor for the most: another year end, best of list. While it seems that 2011 was a mixed bag as far as cinema goes, there clearly were some diamonds in the celluloid (and digital) rough.

Can a film be effective without memorable visuals? Possibly yes, but the films that have achieved immortality have almost always been borne of a balance between the words on the page and the images that are burned into our collective consciousness.

Carrie Bradshaw from "Sex and the City" once said that Chanel is timeless – a work of art that can be appreciated throughout the ages. Timeless like the “Mona Lisa” (1519), "Romeo and Juliet" (1595), and the Taj Mahal (1648) proved to be. Timeless like the Beatles (1960s) are proving to be.

When Film Slate Magazine first profiled Jayce and Tiffany Bartok at this time last year, the married indie filmmakers from New York were just beginning on their odyssey in getting their film “Tiny Dancer” funded and produced. The Bartoks, with Bryan DeCastro, had formed The Independent Collective, which they hoped would spearhead the crowd funding of their movie. The eventual goal of The Independent Collective is to also help other projects get made; “Tiny Dancer” was to serve as somewhat of a test case. Their goal is to have the film shot by the summer of 2012.

Oh, the things we would do if we had $100,000. Not the things we could, or even should, do, like, say, kill our debts, invest, invest, contribute to that often mentioned, although surely imagined, nest egg.

If there is one thing that an independent filmmaker has more control of while on set during production these days than at any time in the past, it is camera selection and subsequently how the finished film will look. While artists have always been able to find a way to get a camera into their hands, the rise of digital—and especially now that digital is getting closer to mimicking the depth of field and texture of real film—has substantially reduced at least one headache for an entire generation of auteurs.

As the independent film movement has grown, flourished and changed over the past 30 years, so too has the indie film festival circuit. There have always been a few stalwarts, such as Cannes (which is an entirely different animal in the film festival world), the Ann Arbor Film Festival (which caters to the more experimental side of the craft) and the San Francisco International Film Festival, but it wasn’t really until the Sundance Film Festival (founded in the late 1970s as the Utah/U.S. Film Festival) and the Toronto International Film Festival rose to prominence--as the indie film movement hit its stride in the mid-1990s--that filmmakers fully realized the importance of screening their films at festivals.

Independent film distribution can sometimes feel like a mystery. Successes doesn’t always come for the most deserving films, and the failures of ‘can’t miss’ titles often hinge on a series of unrelated mistakes. There will always be the flukes, the special projects primed to become overnight brands, despite the convoluted path taken, and the promising projects that are destined to fail, purely due to poor timing, a lack of proper funding, a misstep in execution, or simple buyer fatigue. “Nobody knows nothing” is still the finest, grammatically incorrect truism there is, but it is the job of the producer to work countless hours in the attempt to uncover a teeny bit more than 'nothing,' to predict the market and the audience's tastes as thoroughly as is possible.

So, where do we go from here?

It’s a question that filmmakers—indie and mainstream alike—are asking themselves when it comes to the question of distribution for their movies, starting with finding a company that’s willing to put a stake in their project to where and how their movie will be seen (i.e., theatrical, VOD, Internet streaming, or DVD).

As a filmmaker, Lisa F. Jackson doesn’t shy away from tough subjects. And there is no tougher subject than rape, and this country’s history of sexual assault laws and how often the victims were treated worse than the men who attacked them. In her documentary “Sex Crimes Unit,” Jackson examines how the laws have changed and the district attorneys and investigators who changed them and continue working tirelessly for victims today.

It is a daunting task indeed to try and encapsulate the life and career of somebody like Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, who served two terms as Governor of California from 1959 to 1967. Then as now, California was a bellwether state, and Brown’s time in office was marked by an explosion in the state’s population, a massive aqueduct public works project, a revolutionary education master plan enabling thousands of students the chance to go to college, and changing dynamics within civil rights and social movements.

It is not very often that a film has to wait 45 years to see the light of day. But for the recently rediscovered “Summer Children,” which features cinematography by Academy Award winner Vilmos Zsigmond that is exactly what happened.

Directed by James Bruner, “Summer Children” is a lost black and white treasure, a cinematic bridge between Italian neo-realism, French New Wave, Film Noir, and American youth movies that were so prominent in the 1960s. The film was made on a small budget, and features mostly student actors from UCLA. Of the main cast, only David Arkin, who has a minor role, went onto sustained success acting in movies, appearing in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” “Nashville,” and Alan J. Pakula’s “All the President’s Men.” Stuart Anderson, John Hanek and Valora Noland had minor roles in TV and films throughout the 1960s and not much beyond, while Sandy Gabriel had some success in soap operas. Bruner never directed another film, and his last credit is as production designer on “Blood Bath” in 1966. Writer Norman Handelsman never had another script made into a feature.

While there are many tangible things that you can learn as a writer, such as structure and format—all the things that make up a strong foundation for your screenplay—it’s what you do with that knowledge, and also how you apply the intangibles, that will separate you from the pack.

For many indie filmmakers, they never set out to be writers at all, so the entire screenwriting process becomes a learning curve (even more so than usual). The necessity of having a script to make a film dictates that they become writers as well, even if they only initially saw themselves as directors. Add a collaborator into the mix of coming up with and finishing a screenplay, and now there’s a completely different dimension.

There are generally three kinds of directors. There are those that define their films, those that let their films define them, and those that can bridge the first two worlds, knowing when to step to the front and when to let the story lead. Sidney Lumet, who died this past weekend at the age of 86, was most decidedly the third kind of director.

Lumet preferred letting the story unfold in front of the viewer. He kept takes to a minimum, and constructed the movie as he went along, trying to minimize the time spent in post production.

If you’re a filmmaker at almost any level, you’ve figured out that the process depends on collaboration. Unless it’s just you making a documentary (and even then, you’ll need the participation of your subjects), filmmaking requires that you have a dependable crew and people that share your vision and will work hard to make that happen.

Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 Science-Fiction masterpiece, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” based on Arthur C. Clarke’s novel (which was actually released after the movie; Clarke also co-wrote the screenplay with Kubrick) instantly became a precedent setting film in this genre and a masterpiece of modern filmmaking. The two had been in discussions as early as 1964 about collaborating on a science-fiction piece.

Using a critical eye, a viewer cannot help but consciously or subconsciously catch the clever use of symbolism throughout the film.

When “I Will Follow” opens in five cities on March 11^th, this quiet, slice of life drama will be something of a test case. It will be the first film released through The African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement (AFFRM), a grass roots organization looking to increase exposure and get theatrical distribution for African-American independent movies. The film will open in Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Seattle.

At first, it might seem like a typical indie film shoot. Four days in New York City, with a small cast and a mostly volunteer crew. But “The Sea is All I Know” is far from typical. The short, from writer/director Jordan Bayne, stars two time Oscar nominee Melissa Leo (“Frozen River,” “The Fighter”), and took Bayne the better part of four years to write, find financing, and finally, shoot and finish the film.