Making your first feature – it’s the holy grail of the indie film world. For most directors with a few short films under their belt, it seems like the logical next step (some believe it’s the only next step). But is it doable? If you’ve got a script in hand and the passion to make it happen you’ll find there are a plethora of filmmaking blogs urging you on: articles of inspiration, tips and tricks, and list after list of breakout features made for cheap (This one features Rian Johnson’s Brick ($475K), Lynch’s Eraserhead ($100K), and Christopher Nolan’s $6K Following).
The advice isn’t bad. By all means, screw the obstacles and throw the conventions of production to the wind; get out there and make your movie, however you can! The constant refrain in the indie film world – it’s easier to make films now than it has ever been – is true.
It’s also true that making a feature film is an enormously difficult endeavor that will demand a great deal from everyone involved, and the less money you have the more honest you need to be about that reality. Shooting a feature for uber-cheap is possible (see above), but not if you haven’t first come to terms with the limitations you’ll be facing.
To break down those limitations and paint a picture of a low-budget feature shoot, I caught up with a couple of producer friends whose recent work includes indie features at two budget levels: $250,000 and $50,000.
So, without further ado, here’s what a quarter-million-dollar feature looks like:
• 15-20 days of shooting
• 4-6 person production/AD team, plus 3-5 PAs
• 3-5 person camera team
• 3-5 person G&E team
• 2-3 person art team
• 1-person sound, HMU, wardrobe departments
• A grip truck, an art truck, and a production truck
• City permits, parking permits
Here are the same stats when you shrink the budget to $50,000:
• 15-20 days of shooting
• 2-person production/AD team, maybe a PA
• A DP who pulls their own focus and sets up their own lights
• Day-players in camera and G&E, only on big days
• 1-person art team
• 1-person sound team, day-playing HMU, no wardrobe
• A director-owned sedan stuffed with a couple of C-stands and a few LED lights
• What’s a permit?
What we’re looking at here is the difference between $16,000 dollars per shooting day and $3,000. Put another way, it’s the difference between a catering company that delivers several hot breakfast options every morning and the same breakfast sandwiches three weeks in a row. It’s the difference between paying for locations and begging for them.
If you’re a director, $250K means you’ll be able to go home at wrap and look over the sides for tomorrow. At $50K, it means you’re probably organizing wardrobe for the next day, or shopping for props, or sitting down for an emergency scheduling meeting.
There are plenty of similarities between these budget levels. Both require flexibility in the face of weather, or if a location drops, or if cast availability changes. Even with a quarter-million in the bank, it’s likely you’ll find yourself rescheduling the entire shoot halfway through, or rewriting scenes on the spot to work within production limitations.
Big shows can hold actors on off days to guarantee their cast is always available, they can pay locations for the flexibility of reschedules, they can create rain on sunny days and sun on rainy days. In the low budget world, we don’t have that freedom. We have to make up for it with ingenuity and flexibility. What do you do when a location can only shoot Monday and an actor is only free Friday? Find a new location, find a new actor, or rewrite the scene to take place somewhere you can shoot.
No matter what, shooting a low budget feature is going to put a lot of pressure on your production staff. As a producer on a $50K film, your days will be 14 hours at a minimum, and you’ll be doing everything – I mean everything. I’ve Assistant Directed at this level, and I found myself setting up lights or holding a boom pole as often as I said “roll sound.”
For production, there’s not much of a respite at a larger scale. A $250K-size crew means the DP won’t need help lighting, so you’ll have time on set to log expenses and do production reports. But at $250K, you have five times the expenses to log, and you might be up late dumping the day’s footage or putting up no-parking signs at a future location (because now you have money for parking permits, but you still can’t pay for a locations department).
And let’s talk rates. At $3K per day (~$50K for 16 days), you can pay a six-person crew $250 per day and have $1500 left for all your rentals, food, locations, etc. But if you throw a three-person cast in the mix, suddenly you only have $750 left. It’s more likely that you’re paying your crew flat rates for the duration of the shoot – no paid prep days, no overtime. For a lot of the crew, their actual hourly may come out below minimum wage.
$250K is more money, but does it mean people get paid well? That depends. If you keep the crew size to six, sure. But chances are your production will scale up to the size of the example above, in which case crew rates are probably going to remain marginal.
So what’s the takeaway?
Making films is not cheap, and even a $250,000 budget will demand sacrifices. In the words of one of my producer friends, “If anyone asks, I would never recommend doing it for less than $250K. At $250K we didn’t have any luxuries, but our crew was comfortable and taken care of. For less, you start to do it at the expense of the crew.”
This is one of the major realities of low-budget feature filmmaking: the crew will be a group of friends doing you favors, or friends-of-friends doing their friends favors, or they’ll be young and green. Everyone will be there because they know the team, because they’re passionate about filmmaking, and hopefully because they believe in you and your script.
This is actually a good thing, because it’s going to be tough and you want a crew that’s along for the ride. You should also recognize the sacrifices they’re making for your movie. As a producer, my first responsibility is always to the crew, and then to the script. If you’re directing a low-budget feature, orient your priorities to match – no project is worth exploiting the people who make it possible.
As for my friend’s advice, I’d alter it slightly: I wouldn’t recommend making a feature film for less than $250,000 if you want a “professional” experience, if you imagine your feature shoot having a grip truck or a catering service or if you’re unprepared to make creative concessions.
And I wouldn’t recommend doing it at all unless you’re completely lucid about the resources you have and what they mean, until you know your per-day spending limit, until you’ve been through the budget line by line (if you’re not great at budgeting, find someone who is).
You can make a movie for $50K. Heck, Christopher Nolan made a fantastic movie for $6K. But Nolan knew exactly what he had to work with. His film Following shot exclusively on Saturdays. They shot in the homes of friends and family for free. They didn’t use lights. And they never had to sacrifice on the quality of the film, because Nolan wrote it to be as producable as possible.
You can make a movie on a tiny budget. It’s just that if your movie features an enormous cast and grand locations, or if you can’t simplify each scene to three or four shots, you won’t be able to make your movie. That’s okay. Save the script for another time, write something simpler, and make that film instead.
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Note From Tongal: “Realities of the Low-Budget Feature" is part of a series of Tongal Community-written blog posts that were originally sourced in the Tongal Blog Open Call Project. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Tongal. Read more Tongal Community-written posts here and then Pitch us a topic you'd like to write about for the Tongal Blog!
