7 Steps to Making A Low Budget Film: STEP THREE

Is it possible to make a film without funding? Well, I’ve been doing it for over 20 years so… absolutely you can!

But it’s not easy. In fact, the scale of the task is often so overwhelming it puts many of us off even starting.

So here are my 7 Steps to making a film without a budget…

Each step will be a separate post. Today, I’ll talk about deciding the way to shoot your film.

3. Choose your method

Now is the time to determine your shooting strategy. Before I shot Third Contact, I spent months looking into various ideas. Would I shoot it in one go, over say 2 or 3 frenzied weeks? Or was there another way I could do it?

Then I read about Christopher Nolan’s first feature film Following, which was shot intermittently over the duration of a year. Here’s a list of different methods for shooting feature length films, with pros and cons of each.

21 day shoot

I shot Kosmos this way. Although a web series, turned out to be about feature length when all the episodes were added together. I had a budget of £30k to spend.

Pros: The obvious advantage of shooting the whole film in one go is the speed of production. By the end of 21 days, you will have the majority of the footage needed to start editing (if things go reasonably to plan). You also avoid problems such as the main actor wanting to change his appearance or finding other work before you complete the film. With a 21 day shoot everything is more focused, there’s perhaps more team spirit as the cast and crew get a chance to bond. Also, the cast and crew are more focused because everyone (fingers crossed) knows the urgency of the situation.

The cast and crew, including the director, are able to completely submerge themselves into the process of making a film

Cons: You have to be much more prepared. You have to be as ready as possible when filming starts as there will very little opportunity to fix things as you go. As a “no budget” filmmaker, the director often has to take on many more roles than in a fully budgeted production. While filming Kosmos, I was also the van driver. Which meant I had to get up at 6am to collect the main actor and then drive to the location. Then find somewhere to park the van. At night, I’d finish at 9pm and sometimes have to make props for the next day.

So the chance of sorting any issues out are minimal, as I was already fully committed. I had a producer who was able to help in some instances, but basically you start the rollercoaster and hope you have enough energy (and fortune!) to make it to the end.

So, in conclusion, this method is the traditional route. It’s fast but less flexible and carries certain risks.

Intermittent filming

As I mentioned, this is the method I used for Third Contact. With this strategy, you aim to shoot the film in small pieces over a much longer period. Obviously, you can shoot in lengths of time which suit you and the cast and crew. When I set out, I didn’t know exactly how long it would take but I told everyone involved it would be months. In the end, it took just over a year.

In a way, each shooting period is like a mini production in itself. Imagine shooting 15 short films over a year, some of them taking days and some just a couple of hours in the evening. You schedule the shoot, email everyone needed, agreeing a date and time. After you have the footage needed, everyone goes home and you start planning the next bit.

The way I planned it, I would shoot by location availability. I broke the script down into locations, the biggest chunk of script took place in a therapist’s home/office. A friend offered me his apartment in Swiss Cottage, so this was my first section. From what I remember, we had about 20 pages to shoot over 4 days.

Then I would start planning the next part.

Pros: This method really suits a zero budget situation because you can work around everyone’s day jobs or other commitments (as did Nolan when shooting Following). As a director who is probably covering many other roles including producer/manager, this method gives you more breathing space. You can take more care of each part of the film as you have far more time to prepare and think about how it will work.

This method also has the advantage of flexibility. If you shoot for a day and it doesn’t work too well, you reschedule to shoot again without too much pain. If things go badly wrong with a 21 day shoot, the damage inflicted can be fatal to the production, in some cases. It’s also easier to change, adapt and modify things as you go.

Cons: It takes much longer to get the footage. The main risk of this is losing main cast. I think in Following the main actor had to change his hair for another part, so they modified the story to include this change. The most famous example is David Lynch’s first film Eraserhead. The shoot took years, meanwhile lead actor had a very distinctive hair style. But luckily he managed to keep it and hardly changed appearance over the time.

Another downside is perhaps less focus. Also, you’ll probably find key personnel (in my case, basically just me) have to keep driving the project along. The energy dissipates and then has to be regenerated for each shoot period.

Super fast

How about shooting a feature film in 2 or 3 days? This is the ultimate zero budget movie making method. I haven’t attempted it myself, but I know some guys who did. Char Man is a horror film shot in less than 3 days. This method lends itself to the “found footage” style.

In this case, the filmmakers used their smartphones in the style of an ordinary smartphone owner. In other words, the cast were the directors and the crew all in one. Simply filming themselves as 3 guys making a low budget documentary.

Pros: You get to make a feature film extremely fast. Remember, time is certainly money – even if it’s just food and travel. So by shooting in 3 days or less you cut your already minimal costs even further. Compared to the 21 day shoot, it’s a 7th of the cost. This method also lends itself to the improvised script, which means less script development time.

Cons: The rough and ready, found footage style can be a hard sell. It’s not to everyone’s tastes, however it does suit horror films (see The Blair Witch Project and the like). With the camerawork being inherently straightforward, success relies on the performances and the narrative.

So that’s 3 basic methods to shoot a feature film without a budget. Of course, you will adapt them to suit your particular circumstances. Or you can think up another ingenious method.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about Step Four: Pre-Production. The success of your film shoot depends on great organisation. Find out some tips to make sure things run as smoothly as possible.

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Want to see some of the documents used during the production of a low budget film? Schedules, location plans, cast contracts and more can be found here: Low Budget Film Production Samples (Patrons Only)