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by ALYXANDRA VESEY Gender changes the way independent filmmakers work, and it must change the way we understand their work. Traditionally, belowthe-line labor is differentiated from above-the-line labor within media industries as being skill-based rather than creative, and thus compensated at scale and standardized through various guilds and unions. In recent years, scholars like John Caldwell, Miranda Banks, and Vicki Mayer have challenged perceptions about the lack of creativity in below-the-line labor, as well as the ways in which such labor is delegitimated through industrial and cultural processes of gendering. 1 But scholarship also needs to focus on the ways in which gender and social media convergence blur the boundaries between above-the-line and below-the-line labor in independent American microbudget filmmaking. As Chris Atton observes, working between these lines is often a …