Filmmaking

• “Rebel without a Crew” by Robert Rodriguez – Buy, read, have fun, feel encouraged and inspired!
• “10 minute film school” by Robert Rodriguez on YouTube (Part 1, Part 2) or as text – more of the above
• “Film is dead” by Robert Rodriguez on YouTube (Part 1, Part 2)

Equipment/Technology

• philipbloom.net – A good blog to follow to stay up to date regarding new equipment but don’t let yourself get carried away! Reading the stuff there often makes you want expensive things (from the perspective of a super-low-budget filmer).
• www.personal-view.com – The site built around the GH1/GH2 hack. Also a good place to find technical information but it’s also one of those places where you have to be careful to put things into perspective because the discussions about quality can become more of a techie flame war (legitimate pastime) than of practical use for you.
• www.eoshd.com – An interesting blog to follow for the same reasons as following Philipp Bloom
• Cheesycam – A nice site with lots of do-it-yourself instructions for building all sorts of camera equipment

Sound

• The freesound sound archive – Decent free sound archive. You need to register to download. Lots of good basic sounds are there but also lots of crap so you need some time to work your way through the search results. If you need a simple sound effect like a cat’s meow, you’re likely to find something usable, for more demanding stuff like fight or gun sounds I found the results less than impressive but YMMV.
• Sounddogs is a decent commercial sound archive with IMHO reasonable pricing that does make it an option for super-low-budget-productions if it has that special sound effect that makes a scene work and saves you hours of work

Effects

• Video Copilot is an excellent site for people looking for instructions to do things in Adobe After Effects by Andrew Kramer, who also does a great job presenting this in a fun way. Among other things, he also sells effects libraries, of which I have personally bought Action Essentials II and I think it is worth every penny.

Software

• Celtx – A nice simple free preproduction tool. Lets you start with a rough a film idea formulated in a treatment and lets you add more and more detail until you have a finished screenplay and a production plan. Totally up to you how much of this functionality you want to use. Worth looking at (Mac OS X). Of course you can always just use a word processor and a spreadsheet. I think it’s a matter of personal preference.

Music

• Premium Beat is my favorite to find music for your movie if you don’t want to compose it yourself and you want to stay on the legal side
• Jamendo, an alternative
• Musicbed, another alternative