As I have a budget meeting for @Pablo’s web series’ second season tonight, this has been on my mind! My making a budget strategies start with the script, and making a breakdown. There are many ways to do script breakdowns (linking one of my fave videos from Rocket Jump Film School at the bottom of this), and in general they’re meant to aid the directors, but they’re also super important when figuring out your budget.

Essentially, you go through the script and write down, by episode, what locations, actors, props, wardrobe, special effects, set dressing, and extras are needed. Then, based on the length of each scene, I make a preliminary day breakdown of anticipated shooting days (like @hermdelica said, for your first show you might not know how long it’ll take your crew to shoot a certain number of pages. My rule of thumb- if you’re doing found footage vlogging, between 7 and 15 pages are possible if you have under 3 actors, and if you’re doing traditional filmmaking with multiple angles of coverage, between 5-7 pages a day will be your average). I group anticipated shooting days by location first, then by actors, then by scene complexity. That’ll give you an idea of how many days everyone will need to be available.

After that, I list out all the props needed for the show, down to pieces of paper and pencils, and assign colors for three options- have (we already have this prop), make (we can make this prop from things we already have), or buy (we need to buy this prop). I’ll then scan Amazon to get an idea of how much the “buy” props will cost us.

Once you’ve done this with all the elements of your script (yes, including locations!), sit down with your producing team, writer, and director. What can you cut? Now that you see where the major costs or time sucks are going to exist on this project, can you drop a few props, or exchange them for items you already own? Can you reduce the number of locations, thus reducing the number of shooting days or venues to rent? Can you rewrite a scene so you don’t need extras (ie- more mouths to feed and more people to coordinate with)? Killing your darlings sucks, but it’s necessary when money is limited.

Then, I do what Herman and @LaurenEvansTV did- make a final budget based off of these breakdowns and keep track with spreadsheets of every single purchase made in service of the show. That includes rounds of drinks bought at production meetings and pizza for the table read.

In summation, budgeting is THE WORST but it is also very, very necessary.

Script breakdown video: