3 Tips That Will Help You to Plan and Shoot Your First Low Budget Short Film

Image credits – Pixabay Making short films on a low budget is both challenging and enthralling. However, with the arrival of affordable, high-grade film equipments, making films have never been easier, whether you have a measly, micro-budget or your film is being supported by a big, studio. Some useful tips
  1. Incorporate the right elements in your story: A story without a solid structure and foundation can easily topple. It will have no pizzazz. You need a conflict between the characters that can be used as the underlying force field keeping everything connected, an objective that the film and its characters will try to achieve, lots of actions and dialogues that will keep the interest alive. The camera work should keep the suspense alive and cinematography should add finer details to the film. Also, having an eye for beauty and aesthetics is important.
  2. Getting the budget right: A film is not about creatives only. It is also about planning and optimal management of the resources at your disposal. That can’t be achieved without a proper budget proposal and plan, even if you are working on a shoestring budget. As the unit production manager, you may have to sit down with a spreadsheet program, assign prices and costs to various film gears and equipments, hiring of services of actors and technicians, rent for props and locations, food and other essentials that would be used to support the crew members. Many investors would look at your budget before pledging an investment in your project. You should then create a trailer or show your potential investors a few rushes from your film to convince them. Have a contingency fund as well. This will help you take care of the costs you couldn’t foresee at the time of appropriation.1 Image credits – Pixabay
  3. Spend on media storage: Today a storage space in the digital cloud is available for a small fee. However, it can act as a backup for your hardware malfunction and corruption. You should definitely have multiple hardware backups of different shots, rushes and the final cut but store them with timecodes on the cloud as well. In a digitized world where collaboration on a film during the product or post-production stage is necessary, it also allows your team members to contribute their expertise to the workflow in the cloud directly.
There are quite a few other tips that any budget film maker will give you when talking about a successful execution of ideas. But, the ones mentioned above are often ignored. Hopefully, these will help you to make a ‘complete’ film and make your experience worth remembering and sharing.
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