Working with Your Empty Wallet
BY CRAIG GERAGHTY
We’re all accustomed to big visions, and unfortunately, we’re often times more accustomed to empty wallets. That’s the reality and that’s what brings us to this website. The good news is that until Hollywood comes calling with giant budgets for your films, there is a way to still produce quality work with limited funds. In the coming weeks, I’ll focus on ways to turn those big visions into realities, even with an empty wallet. The first step is in the script.
I’ve made films with budgets as low as $1500 and as high as three-hundred and fifty thousand dollars, but there is always one thing that that remains the same. I wish I had more money. Let’s get this straight, you’ll always wish you had more money on your production to pay for better help, better actors, better food or a better location, that will never change, but to eliminate expenses before they are looking you in the eye, that’s a job for you as the writer.
I’ll start with an example that is very drastic, but very effective. I had written a film that I wanted to make come hell or high water. It was a personal story and I thought it could only be told through the 100 pages of dialogue I had written. There was no way a story this important could be told any other way. That was until I had researched what kind of money I was looking at to get it made. I realized that I simply could not make the film without raising about 250K. This was never going to happen. But this film needed to be made!! So what I did, on the advice of some friends, was turn it into a short film. I scoffed at first, but then got to work on writing the short film. I took the concept and the story I was dying to tell from 100 pages to 12 pages. We shot the short film and after it was all said and done, I had a project I was so proud of. The short, From Woodside, Queens, went on to win some awards and also screened at the prestigious Aspen Shorts Fest alongside three Oscar nominees and the eventual winner of that year’s Academy Award for Best Short. In short…you can still make your film if you are willing to rewrite it to a “shootable” length.
You’ve decided that you can’t cut a page and the idea of turning your baby into a short makes you cringe. Okay, how else can I help? You love exploding buildings and car chases, but your budget is built more for firecrackers and parallel parking. What do you do? Rewrite your location, rewrite the action. Let’s assume that you are making a film that has very little to no money. Well, the two page car scene is out, sorry guys, but you can still work in the drama with a carefully rewritten scene. If you have to keep the car in movie, consider a way that you can shoot it with as little motion as possible. Work with your Director of Photography and tell him or her what you hope to accomplish and what kind of drama you are trying to create. If they say it can only be done with a camera car or mounting a camera on the side of the car, you will have to decide if you can afford it. Remember that the camera car and a camera rig on the side of a car will require time. Time is your biggest enemy on a set. Do you really need the scene so bad that you might be willing to lose a day of shooting to get it? Consider all the things that can go wrong and know that they probably will. You might get the shot, but if it took 20 rehearsals and a tired crew and putting an actor in jeopardy, was it worth it? You might be surprised how much drama you can create with a foot chase as opposed to a car chase.
On the feature film I just directed, there were several scenes that included driving. All but one had dialogue and a single actor. The producers, the D.P. and I decided that shots of an actor driving a car are no problem. The scene with dialogue between two actors in the car (driving on a highway) was a problem and would be moved. It didn’t make sense to have the actors engage in a conversation, that they could have had anywhere, in a moving vehicle. We moved the scene to a bedroom and shot it in 25% of the time it would have taken to shoot it in a moving car. Time equals money. We saved thousands of dollars in man-hours.
When writing the script, ask yourself, who you are writing the script for. Is this something that you will be producing for sure? If you have saved up $5000 and it is going into a short film, then write it like that. Consider every location and every prop you place in the film. If your characters are at a baseball game at Citi Field and cheering on the Mets, it might look great, but ask yourself if the dialogue could have been spoken in a local sports bar or in a character’s basement in front of the television with the game on.
You have to write to your empty wallet. Locations are pricey; really consider what locations you can get for free when you write them into a script. I was making a 4 minute short with a budget of $1500 (Husky, 2005). The story revolved around a kid and his desire for a Halloween costume. I needed a costume store for sure. I didn’t cast an actor or hire a D.P. until I had locked down the location because without the location it wasn’t going to happen. I was prepared to trim the amount of scenes in the store as much as needed, but I knew without that location the script was dead. As an alternative, I would have shot the film, but changed the dialogue and action from inside a store to somewhere else and then gone back for exteriors. Either way, I had to be prepared to rewrite to fit my budget. After your big vision has come to your head and you’re ready to start to write it out, do yourself a favor and put those scenes in locations you know you can get (your house, your grandmother’s house, your place of business).
Along with locations, consider the time of day that the scene needs to take place. Let’s say it is a scene that must take place at night and you just can’t live without it. Okay, consider that you will, of course, have to light the scene. Now consider that you will either have to blow it out on lights or live with a grip following your actors with a China Ball connected to an extension cord. But it has to be outside and it has to be at night!
My advice? Use what is available and free. The sun is free. Shooting in daylight can present some problems, but they can be worked with easier than shooting outside at night. For the sake of your budget, consider shooting in the day whenever you can. Shoot at night, but try to keep it indoors. If you’re writing a film that you want to sell, don’t hold back. Let the production company who buys the script pay for the location on Mars, they wouldn’t take the script if they didn’t think they could produce it. But if it’s for you, make sure you write something you know you can afford.
One more way to use your pen to help your wallet is to limit your cast. It’s fun to have a big ensemble cast, but it’s also more expensive and time consuming. Remember that for every actor you write for, that’s one more mouth to feed, one more schedule to work around, one more person you need to dress and one more body that needs to fit into the van. Try to limit your cast, if possible, so that your ambition doesn’t outspend your bank account. There is no cap on the number of people in your screenplay, but be aware if your cast starts to get too big.
There are always exceptions to the rules and these are not hard and fast rules by any stretch of the imagination, just reminders. Write the best script you can, just remember that that script is at its best when it is being produced, so write a script you can produce! Good Luck to you and best of luck to Big Vision Empty Wallet!!!