As much of a boon as ebay has been to bargain hunters and niche sellers, and to those who are looking for hard to find items to buy and those who have them to sell, ebay has also become the prop house to the world of independent filmmakers around the world.

I am the owner of Red Scream Films LLC. We specialize in low budget feature films made for the domestic and international home entertainment markets. We a start-up with limited resources (in other words, money is always tight, and frequently there isn't any!). Props are an extremely important part of any movie but props can be extremely expensive to rent let alone purchase. In most cases, if we need a particular prop, we first look in our own basements, attics and garages. If however we still cannot find what we need, the first place we turn to is ebay.

For a film we are looking at producing this summer I was in need of handgun props. I wanted something that was realistic. A simple search on the keywords prop guns turned up exactly what I needed. In fact I purchase two different models because the price was right and the items were right what I needed. I also needed medical equipment and ebay is jam-packed with that. I don't know why so many sellers have medical supplies on hand or why there are so many buyers interested in purchasing, (especially quack medical devices!) but I could probably outfit an entire hospital with what is on sale at ebay. Luckily I only needed to outfit a single room. Another great find was two pairs of metal gloves that look like something a robotic Freddie Krueger might wear. I got these from China. I've never seen anything like them before and I changed the script just to use them, they are that cool. I would have never known they existed if not for ebay.

On a more technical end, one can also find film and video supplies on ebay. Everything from 8mm film cameras from the 50's and 60's to Super8 and 16mm, and the latest camcorders and other digital filmmaking equipment. The savvy ebay shopper could outfit a small film production studio with what they can find on ebay, from the laptop or old school typewriter used to write the script, to the equipment needed to make the movie, to the resources to produce copies of the movie on dvd for sale. Heck, you could then even sell your film on ebay.