ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

9 years, 7 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin

IMDb, find similar films to yours, look at their (wildly inaccurate) estimated budgets? It's crude, but a start...

9 years, 7 months ago - Marlom Tander

You can't prove who will come.

The "who is your target audience and why will they come" is about assessing your commercial nouce. Those who say "it's for everyone" have just lost their most important audience (the money men).

Even Star Wars isn't for everyone.

What they really want to see is that your expectation of audience matches the genre - if your film is a romance and you claim the audience is teen guys, well you'd better have a very good reason.

Budgets - do them line by line from the ground up. There is NO SHORTCUT. Nor is it rocket science - everyone needs a bed, food and transport. Locations have hire costs and you'll need your gear package plus costumes props etc. Everything else is whatever day rates you have your cast and crew on. Work it out, add it up, hey presto, a budget.

9 years, 7 months ago - Dan Selakovich

You pick 10 films with stories an genre similar to yours that made a profit. Start there. But be careful, if it's a spy film, don't add James Bond to your list. That's pretty obvious, but thought I should mention it.

You can't really do a budget based on other "international location" films. Locations are but a part of a puzzle. Here's a small example: is the budget you're reading make allowances for flying the entire crew out to these "international locations", or are the hiring locally at each place? Unless you know why that particular budget has 6 production managers and 12 fixers, you are out of your depth. You may notice that production design is incredibly pricey. Perhaps they never left London, in that case. There is so much that goes into a budget, and so many considerations to make, it takes an experienced PM to do one properly. And just so you know, you need a schedule before you can do a budget. My advice would be to hire an AD to do a schedule and then a PM to do a budget based on that schedule.

Look, if you're asking these questions, you're not experienced enough to do a prospectus. It will be very good practice, and you should try, but film investors are pretty savvy, and will know if you are a beginner. Team yourself up with a producer that knows this stuff. Or offer to work for free for a producer that knows this stuff, and read every contract and prospectus in his file drawer. I know it sounds like I'm being snarky, but I'm not. I used to do a lot of editing for distributors, and late at night I would sneak into legal, and pull contracts and read them. I learned a shitload.