Location, Location, Location There are two expensive components to a film shoot. Image capture (camera) and the locations. Moving a cast and crew from location to location is time consuming and expensive, regardless of your budget. If you can reduce the amount of location moves, or eliminate them altogether, then you are a huge step closer to reducing your budget. Locations in this scenario suddenly have a huge impact on the script. To learn how, we need only to look at some of the most interesting films of the last few decades: Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Kevin Smith’s Clerks, Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, Orin Pelli’s Paranormal Activity and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. These films have one thing in common: limited locations. In fact, they would each make excellent stage plays. The trick, it seems, is to take a bunch of actors to a limited location and chop them up. When you do this, you will essentially be filming a stage play. But a stage play filmed as a stage play is boring. Turn your limited location script (which is essentially a stage play) into a movie successfully, and you will have what the moguls in Hollywood call Talent.
Image Capture Choosing the camera that suits your script and your budget is simpler than ever before. Most likely you will be shooting on a digital camera. Two elements of any camera you should look out for are: compression and lenses. Remember that all digital cameras generate the same signal. What influences the image quality are the lenses you film through and the numbers of pixels per frame (compression). The ultimate no budget camera trick is to use a little known fact of British law: security camera footage can be recovered if you have been the victim of a crime. The UK is covered in security cameras, some private and some publicly owned. By law, if you suffer a crime, the police will request a copy of the tape from the camera owner. Recce the CCTV cameras in your neighbourhood, write a screenplay, re-enact a series of ’crimes’ and hey presto – you will have your movie shot – for absolutely nothing. Sound It isn’t the look of skin on skin that turns you on in a sex scene. It’s the sound of skin on skin. Professional filmmakers spend much of their time considering and creating the sounds that go with their pictures.
WOSH by Daazo.com - the European Shortfilm Centre 32
The Bucks Are In The Music One interesting fact of film revenue and distribution is that the main revenue streams are from the sound tracks for your film. This is because the musicians unions are much stronger than the actors, writers and film unions. After your film leaves the cinema (if it was lucky enough to get there in the first place) the main revenue streams a movie generates is for the mechanical copyright royalties for the sound track. Filmmakers are usually the last to understand how music royalties are decided, registered and administered. Explaining music copyright law is something that falls outside this short article. Briefly, filmmakers can get cheap free scores by composing and performing the sound track themselves, or by getting an unsigned band to perform it. If this is not possible, they will need to acquire the movie rights to an existing band’s music by contacting them through their agent, or estate if deceased. Remember that there are three music copyright streams: composers, lyricists and performers. Research the track you are interested in through http:// www.ppluk.com/