| Tight Budget? Work With What You Have |
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| with Elliot Grove | |
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Page 1 of 3 Elliot Grove has a mission: to prove that a feature film can be made with little or no money. Siblings, theatrical release posterHe’s made a career of it. Not only did he found the Raindance Film Festival in London in 1992 to showcase independent film (often inexpensively made), but he also spends about 25 weekends, plus 100 weeknights a year, teaching people around the world how to unlock their filmmaking talent on the cheap. He has also taken a page out of his own book and made the 84-minute feature Table 5 for $600 (Cdn). Low budget vs. micro-budgetTIPS
By his definition, a low-budget film is made for less than $1 million (US); a micro-budget film is made for less than $500,000. No budget means less than $100,000. The typical Hollywood feature film budget runs in the range of $40 million to $80 million, and a low-budget Hollywood film costs about $5 million to $8 million. These types of films are called “Indie-wood” films. Raindance, the most successful independent film festival in Europe, usually screens micro-budget films, Grove says. In 2005, it had 2,800 submissions representing 600,000 minutes of tape from 42 countries. Choosing the right scripta 77-page script will never be released to cinema, but only straight to DVD if at allThe essential starting point is choosing a script, he says, and then deciding on a budget. The script must be between 90 and 120 pages long because feature films work out to one page of script per minute and feature films released to cinema run from 90 to 120 minutes. That means a 77-page script will never be released to cinema, but only straight to DVD if at all, he says. Given the choice between two scripts of equal merit, one 90-pages long and the other 120, go for the 90-pager, he says. It’s not only less expensive, but it will also cause fewer headaches to make. Continued... |
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