ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

4 years, 2 months ago - Adem Ay

Hi there - the budgets are just indicators to potential producers and creatives who might want to develop the pitch/story idea into a film. They are estimated by the screenwriter based on the scale and length and ambition of their story idea, and are just hypothetical during the pitching stage.

4 years, 2 months ago - Yuki : the After Effect guy

Understood! I wonder how often those screenplays get made.

4 years, 2 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin

Infrequently - there's not a lot of £100,000's kicking about looking for a home, but it helps someone looking for a £250k feature not to bother with a script pitched with an estimate of £3M!

4 years, 2 months ago - Marlom Tander

The PRODUCER is usually the person that people look to to find the money.

If you are a writer and you really want YOUR SCRIPT to be made, you need to write a script that can be filmed on the funds that you personally have available.

Very few scripts ever see a camera because anyone who knows about film, knows that it's a very high risk investment, where you can drop ALL the money you put in. To afford to drop £100K, you really need to have at least £1M in net assets.

4 years, 2 months ago - Lee 'Wozy' Warren

Investors and lenders fund a film's budget through the endeavours of the producers mainly.

But all writer's needs to be aware of the possible cost implications of what he/she is writing. A newbie to screenplay writing, for example, should try to avoid writing sci-fi heavy scripts. With little to no experience in the industry of successfully selling a $200m budget film script, the chances of landing a deal are rather small.

Plus, as part of your pitch to an agent, producer, director etc, you need to know if your scripts likely costs to be produced are in line with their own experience. A producer who has experience producing sub $1m films may not be interested in a $10m script.

As with any craft, you should be working within your means so as to be best placed to be successful. Don't try to run before you can walk. Start writing scripts with small budgets in mind. If they are short scripts, then maybe aim for budgets of around £0 - £5,000. Or if a feature film script, perhaps £5,000 - £100,000.

If this is still confusing, think about the overall story that you're trying to convey. If there are lots of different locations, this will increase the costs to produce. If there are lots of actors, same. Genre films, like historical or sci-fi, can be expensive as well. Try and keep the story to a limited number of locations and actors.

A simple strategic plan for a writer would be a film that is reasonably easy to fund and produce and that appeals to a wide commercial audience.

Wozy

4 years, 1 month ago - Lee 'Wozy' Warren

Out of interest, Yuki, what experience do you have in the industry so far? Are you just starting out?