Low Budget Filmmaking: How to Make the Most of your Limitations

I’m qualified in low budget filmmaking. Without argument, I have done my time on movie projects that have been made on tiny budgets. My first experience was with my neighbour, a painter and decorator by trade, who had saved up £12,000 to make his first short. This movie was shot so long ago, I don’t now recall the year it was made. But my guess is that it was around 1995.

The film was called Say Hello To Never, written and directed by Paul Thornton. I tried Googling it, but nothing came up. Funny, because I always expect the mighty eye of Google to find everything. If it wasn’t for Google, I would never have discovered John Peel played our song on Radio 1 in 1993. (but now that I’ve written the title of the film into a blog post, the film has it’s internet birth day… whoop.)

Anyway, this was pretty much my first true low budget filmmaking experience. Well, aside from shooting 8mm films as a kid and during my 1 year of college. Me and my partner were musicians, so we were immediately signed on to score the film. For free, of course.

Working for experience

What else did I do for free on this movie? I was sound recordist, general runner, helped with props, sound design. We also allowed Paul to use our flat for free, even though he wanted to paint all the walls dark purple, for cinematography purposes. We agreed on the condition he repainted the room afterwards.

Oh and I also designed the little promo postcard, which was like my first experience using Photoshop. I think? Or was 1995 before Photoshop? Well, whatever I used, I still have a copy of it…

Paul had a couple of industry connections, so managed to get some good quotes. One from a Daily Telegraph critic and the other from legendary director Jack Gold. This was one of the advantages of decorating the houses of wealthy media types living in North London.

There was no behind the scenes photography done during the shoot. So I had to take a still frame from the film. Well, from the telecine, which I seem to remember was very low quality. Bear in mind, I’m not a designer so I just used my artist’s eye and basic knowledge of whatever software I used.

Paul Hired Stansted Airport

Wtf, right? A low budget filmmaker hiring an airport to shoot a movie? That can’t have been cheap. In fact, I think Paul was paying a few hundred per hour of shooting. At the time, Stansted had just been redeveloped and wasn’t a popular airport. So they were happy to have us film there and earn a few extra £s.

But looking back, this is exactly the kind of thing we should never do in low budget filmmaking. Great stories are about people, not locations. Sure, an impressive location can improve your production values, but when you have so little money, it’s best to spend it elsewhere.

The grandfather of low budget film John Cassavetes said, “The greatest location in the world is the human face.” What he meant was, in film this is where the story is truly told. So, spend that little money you have making sure those faces in your cast are doing their best to convey the story.

Found it!

Luckily, on this promo postcard are some cast and crew names. By hunting the other names, I found a listing for the film. Here it is on IMDb. So it hasn’t escaped the internet, afterall. Well, I wasn’t intending to write so much about this film but the memories started coming back and the experience does still relate to filmmaking today.

So this short was shot on 16mm film and edited on a Steenbeck flatbed editor. There was no digital or video editing process involved. The whole thing was edited using prints of the film, so it was true old school low budget filmmaking.

I well remember the first day of filming, which happened to be at Stansted Airport. The pro sound recordist Paul hired couldn’t make it for the first day so, after a 30 minute crash course in using a Nagra reel to reel and Sennheiser 416, I agreed to take the role.

Anyway, I’m glad I got to be involved in a film shot and edited using actual film before digital took over.

Robert Rodriguez

One of the main filmmakers who inspired thousands of us to try our hand at low budget filmmaking in the 1990s was Robert Rodriguez. If you’ve spent time thinking about making one yourself, you will most likely have heard the name at some point. Here’s what he says about making your first film:

“If you are interested in making a movie, go make one. But make it cheap. Make it dirt cheap. Refuse to spend any money. And see how much you can do with your creativity. So many people come up to me and tell me, ‘Oh yeah I made this movie. We got it in for under you know $200k. But our investors are ‘oh we don’t know what we’re gonna do with it’.’ It’s such a big production when you make a big production out of it. But, don’t. You can have a lot of fun and do some really cool stuff, in your backyard and a few toys. And uh that’s it. Good luck.”

Creativity vs Professionalism

I feel that pretty much the most common trap low budget filmmakers fall into when starting out is this confusion between creativity and what is perceived as “professionalism”. And your key crew will always worry about the latter over the former. They have their “reputation” to worry about, they’ll tell you.

Paul’s cinematographer was, although young and inexperienced, a trained professional and what he said went. And who was Paul to argue with him? A painter and decorator with almost no filmmaking experience, that’s who.

Once Paul had employed a professional DoP, this guy ruled the set and Paul was happy to let him, as he felt he didn’t know enough to argue. I’ve seen this before, where the DoP takes over when he perceives the director to be out of his or her depth. But this is not a healthy state to be in as a director. So what do you do?

Well, Robert Rodriguez was a filmmaker who made a feature film without a crew. He wrote a script, took a 16mm camera and started shooting. Now, in that situation, there’s no crew worrying about their showreel to fight with.

In other words, as a filmmaker discovering your creative voice, the fact you can’t afford a crew is actually an advantage. Make films with the camera you have at hand and start shooting, to learn and to discover. Don’t be afraid that you don’t know what you’re doing, that’s the whole point. Making a no-to-low budget film is your chance to experiment without having to persuade people you know what you’re doing.

Your creativity is what makes you stand out from the crowd. Professionalism is what gets you a job at the bank. This fear of looking bad is what stifles so many low budget films and actually often makes them unwatchable. Do you watch a film to be entertained or moved, or to see the execution of perfect 3 point lighting?

Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan is now a mega budget movie making legend. But he started out with a (almost) no budget feature film called Following (1998). Here’s what he says about how they achieved making a solid feature film on a few thousand.

“With no budget films, guns don’t work very well. You can never get the right replica gun, it’s never got the weight to it, you can’t fire blanks with it. So whenever you see that in somebody’s student film, or whatever, it would always seem to give the budget away. So we used a hammer instead of a gun, because we could do a hammer cheaply and make a rubber hammer to smash the guy’s fingers with.”

“We tried to identify, what are the things that really betray the budget to the audience; what takes them out of the film and stops them being able to engage with the film as a story the whole way through.” Christopher Nolan, about Following

Create your own world

The movies that stand out to us are where entire worlds have been created. In other words, the film is about a certain type of person, living a certain type of life, in a certain style. All those things come together to create a world which identifies you as a filmmaker.

The problem comes when we make films not as a filmmaker but as a film watcher. In my first FREE Film School post I wrote about transforming yourself from a film watcher to a filmmaker. What do I mean?

I see so many filmmakers who are trying to recreate the worlds that inspired their love for cinema. If they grew up with Tarantino films, they try to recreate Tarantino films in their movies. If they’re a SciFi or Star Wars fan, they try to recreate Star Wars or Blade Runner with their $200 movie.

Why do so many aspiring filmmakers do this? Because they are still film watchers. Film watchers want to escape their own world and enter the world of their favorite filmmaker (or film universe).

The biggest resource a no-budget filmmaker has is their own world. But, as a film watcher, this is the very same world you’re trying to escape from. Therefore, it’s really important that as a filmmaker you make this step from observing to creating. The world you inhabit is the world where you need to set your film to create your film world.

4 Low Budget Film Directors

Robert Rodriguez made his no budget film (El Mariachi) in Mexico, about characters not too far removed from his own personal world.

Christopher Nolan made a film (Following) set in his hometown of London, with British actors and set in locations he could get access to for free.

Kevin Smith made a low budget film (Clerks) using people he knew as cast and set in the store he worked in during the day.

Richard Linklater shot his low budget film (Slacker) in Austin, Texas casting people he knew. And the characters were not gangsters or astronauts, they were kinds of people he grew up with. The video below contains Linklater’s commentary for the whole film. By the way, Slacker was Linklater’s second feature, after making one with an 8mm camera.

Larger than real life

That’s not to say these directors made films about reality. They didn’t make documentaries. Instead, they expanded their world to create a new “larger than life” world, albeit based on what they had to hand.

Watch any of these 4 films and you will see the style and type of world which still appears in the these directors’ works to this day. They didn’t get noticed in a futile attempt to remake films made by their heroes. Instead, they saw the world around them and re-interpreted it, like a painter or a novelist.

A director’s voice, style, vision

In Rodriguez’s low budget film we see an interest in the crime world. In my opinion, out of these 4 filmmakers, Rodriguez has the least defined style or voice. El Mariachi is really a kind of “homage” to crime films and Westerns. He very much fits with Quentin Tarantino in that he aims to re-imagine certain genres of low budget movie and make them more accessible to the masses. Which is in itself a kind of style.

With Christopher Nolan’s Following we see his early interest in film noir, in films driven by expositional dialogue, in non-linear storytelling, and in creating a puzzle which the audience must work out for themselves. From Memento onwards, Nolan has pursued similar themes, except with vast budgets.

Likewise, Kevin Smith’s Clerks introduces us to his particular brand of off-the-wall, irreverent comedy, delivered by characters that young, nerdy hipsters of the age could relate to. And then there’s Richard Linklater, whose Slacker depicts a similar lost generation, but with less comedy and more philosophical musing.

Dialogue driven

Note that the films of the last 3 directors are very much driven by dialogue, rather than action.

Even Nolan’s Batman films are pretty wordy. And this comes from Nolan’s love of film noir (which was also by budget necessity often driven by dialogue). Because it’s far far cheaper to film people talking than it is to film them flying through space, engaged in a car chase, or having a gun battle.

Or even taking a stroll down the high street. And this is simply down to the extra uncertainties and organisation which needs to take place.

The most important lesson

For any aspiring filmmaker looking to have a go at their first film on a low budget, going from film-watcher to film-maker is your most important step. This is how you create the world and style you hope one day to be known for. And this step should come first, even though it’s tempting to put it last.

Making a low or no budget film is the perfect opportunity, free from an overbearing professional crew, to express your ideas. And to do this you must look to the your world, and not to the escapist worlds of other filmmakers. Sure, we can get ideas and inspiration. But the core of your film should rest in the world you have access to – mentally and physically.

Well, I seem to have written enough for 2 posts already and I feel like there’s more to talk about here. But I’ll stop and come back to this theme in another post. Until then…