ASK & DISCUSS
INDEXIs anyone inspired by the film Layover? Made for $6000.
9 years, 9 months ago - Anthony Green
I would love to meet you with a view to meeting like minded people and getting a team together.
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9 years, 9 months ago - Dan Selakovich
Yeah, I'm with you Paddy. Robert Rodriguez was excellent at hyping himself that way. His first feature was promoted as a $7000 movie. It was immediately apparent that his 7k movie had a 40,000 dollar sound mix.
Sound is my downfall, for sure. I just couldn't put something out in the world that I mixed in my living room. I think you can make a film for $7k, but I also think the filmmaker would have to be comfortable with a 'less-than' result. Or possibly not be experienced enough to know what stinks and what doesn't.
Response from 9 years, 9 months ago - Dan Selakovich SHOW
9 years, 9 months ago - Kays Alatrakchi
I also would like to add that people making features for very little money is actually fairly commonplace nowadays. I personally know a number of directors who have pulled in features for sub-$30. What is in reality extremely rare is for any of those films to end up being watchable, let alone actually good!
Response from 9 years, 9 months ago - Kays Alatrakchi SHOW
9 years, 9 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin
Slight tangent - I also wonder if it's sustainable - if you don't pay people, they don't get to pay their rent or eat, so you must run out of favours quickly.
Will the director secure proper money off the back if this film and press? The problem is even if he gets 10x the budget, or 100x the budget, that's still making movies for peanuts, and having to make the same movie, effectively, but paying people closer to the going rate as freebies dry up. I notice his indiegogo campaign didn't smash their target https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help-us-complete-the-lax-trilogy#/ so hopefully he'll manage to capitalise on the press and get some studio money (although in studio terms, why spend money when they can get the films so cheap as acquisitions, but that's another story!).
I looked at the link above for The Inheritance, again it's a low spend, effectively privately subsidised film. It may be great, but it pulled in 2 IMDB reviews, and no box office figures, so it'll be a somewhat limited release, I guess. There's a lot to be said for telling stories economically, but if nobody sees it, was it worth everybody's time/material investment?
Response from 9 years, 9 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin SHOW
9 years, 9 months ago - Ronnie Mackintosh
Here's an interview with Layover director, Joshua Caldwell in which he explains very clearly and honestly how he made his feature and was able to keep the costs down. And have a look at The Inheritance - http://imdb.to/1PxNfrS, made with a budget of £5,000 and made a bit of a noise when it was released. Here's a small clip with the Director Charles Henri Belleville - http://bit.ly/1kn51kR. Anthony, good luck mate, and stay positive.
Response from 9 years, 9 months ago - Ronnie Mackintosh SHOW
9 years, 9 months ago - Dan Selakovich
Paddy, once again, you've stolen my rant!! When I started, back in the late 70s early 80s, there were all sorts of producers that would take advantage, or seemingly at the time, with low paychecks. But you gain experience, or you might get a bump up (someone that's worked on bigger budget pictures as a 2nd AD, might get a low paycheck on a low-budget feature, but would be bumped up to 1 AD, gaining that experience). It was a legit way of making a picture. But now the legit way is NO pay. As I've said before in these forums, I just couldn't do that to someone--even if they offered to work for free--on a feature.
As Paddy points out, no one has figured out the distribution model on these small pictures. I guess you can get your film in front of eyeballs, but can you get it in front of paying eyeballs? It seems not, except for the very rarest of situations. So what are these features for? To get the director a calling card, mostly, I guess. But it had better be excellent for that to work. Of the 100,000 spec scripts written in 2014, 65 were purchased. And how many of those were produced? The odds for a no-budget feature seem to have worse odds of making their money back.
Response from 9 years, 9 months ago - Dan Selakovich SHOW
9 years, 9 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin
$6k makes a great headline to get attention, but these figures are not usually the whole truth. Fact is, a lot of people will have *subsidised* production, through free labour, etc., and the figure will exclude any of the legals, deliverables, format shifts, packaging, promotion, etc. I doubt it included any asset use (eg allowing for depreciation on cameras, grip, etc), and I suspect their insurance position may have been somewhat minimal, too.
Certainly it's impressive what can be done on a very modest technical budget (I imagine the bulk of the money went on permits, transport, food), but you can't ever trust a Hollywood number as being accurate, it's all part of the marketing machine.
Response from 9 years, 9 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin SHOW
9 years, 9 months ago - Kays Alatrakchi
I agree with everything that's been said above, and I would like to add that sometime a particular filmmaker has a particular set of skills or circumstances which make him/her able to achieve something for very cheap which would have cost anyone else a lot of money. For instance someone who is a professional VFX artist might be able to achieve an incredible visual look which would cost many thousands to anyone else.
Response from 9 years, 9 months ago - Kays Alatrakchi SHOW
9 years, 9 months ago - John Lubran
'Blair Witch Project' $25k to make, another $700k to make good enough to meet the distributors standards and then another $5m to bring to market! A typical actual reality when applied to these things within the entrenched technical and business models of long experience.
What does make a difference these days though is the power of the technology increasingly available to the bedroom studio, compared with just a decade ago, and the emergence of new and viable distribution vectors. We're not quite fully there yet but the writing is writ large on the walls.
Response from 9 years, 9 months ago - John Lubran SHOW