How much should a short film cost?

Few things drive me crazier then every time I read a headline about a film that was made for an absurdly low budget. Not because I don’t think you should make movies unless you can raise a ton of money but because those numbers almost certainly don’t tell the whole picture.

You might not have bought your iPhone with the intention of making a movie on it but if you did thats $1000+ that you spent on your film that you probably aren’t accounting for. If your DP has 20 years experience their talent has a value even if you don’t write them a check. If you spent a week knocking on restaurant doors you didn’t get the location for free you invested your time and energy which is worth something, and not in the abstract, Hollywood/Commercial projects pay scouts anywhere from $500-$700 per day for that work.

I’m not saying you should account for all that in-kind work and donated time to inflate your budget. It is an unnecessary exercise that wont be much benefit for most filmmakers, exceptions include grant applications or if you are trying to sweet talk an investor. I’m just suggesting that we stop wearing our low budgets as a badge of honor.

There is nothing wrong with not having enough money, asking for favors or bartering for the things you need.

Make your film however you need to!

As long as you are respectful of your crew and you stick to the terms you mutually agree to I think working on a film for no money to gain experience, a better credit or just because you want to is perfectly acceptable. The joys of free markets is that you can freely exchange one thing of value for another thing you consider of equivalent value to YOU, it’s amazing.

But don’t take their contribution, or yours, for granted by celebrating your tiny budget. To me that belittles the work, time and artistic contributions everyone put into the film.

For many years I saw the film institutions in Miami, but also everywhere else, doing a lot of work to get films made and not a lot of work to create sustainable livings for filmmakers. The promise that a successful film would lead to more open doors for the writer, director producers, stars, didn’t seem to be materializing and it certainly wasn’t trickling back down to the rest of the cast and crew that made the films.

That is why the “making a living part” of our mission was so central to me. With fewer and fewer films making a profit or leading to bigger and better budgets what if we focused on raising enough money upfront to make sure everyone on the film could at least pay their rent/mortgage that month from the project?

It is a hard sell, especially for a first project, and especially when everyone is celebrating the $1000 feature that in reality costs orders of magnitude more. So here is a breakdown of what our film cost and the many many things we still had to get for free in order to make sure the money we did raise would go to our team.

We raised just about $26,500 for the making of our short film ( I rounded all the numbers for ease).

~$21,000 paid to the cast, crew including post team

~$1000 on meals/crafty

~ $600 on production (insurance, gas, supplies, etc)

~$1200 on equipment

~$2600 on set dec and costumes

~$200 so far on film festival submissions

But that doesn’t account for half of what is actually in the film

First and for most the main four creatives of the film ( Nat, Vicky, Vane and myself) all deferred our rates even though we have been working on the film on and off for four years - with no end in sight. Plus we all did double and triple duty on the film, we were all EPs raising the funds for the film, Vicky was also our location manger, Vane did costumes, and I supervised production and post in addition to my creative producing duties.

Our production designer (Michelle) had 2 days of prep but spent at least a couple of weeks talking through plans with us and making shopping lists. She also helped in post creating the yearbook graphics you see in the film.

The three incredible women we hired as PAs (Ashley, Jes & Olivia) ended up being our set dec team but also stand ins, extras and part time gaffers on the film.

Our DP (Art) offered to color graded the film and spent so many hours fine tuning the color to make our crazy fruits shine I couldn’t even begin to calculate that value.

Our editor (Brian) made 26 cuts of the film in addition to laying in a lot of the sound design.

We bartered with one of our post sound mixers (Dan). He did the initial mix in exchange for ads on our podcast to promote his business.

And when both our sound mixer and our editor had to step away and we still had audio tweaks to make my amazing friend Chris dropped everything and added layers to our sound design we hadn’t even imagined, and he would of done it for free but I insisted on paying him something even if it was way below what he deserved.

And at the very end, when we couldn’t get the final song just right, our composer (Luis) brought in a friend (Daniel) and paid him out of his own rate to get the closing song where we needed it to be.

So $21,000 might seem like a lot but it is a tiny fraction of what these filmmakers did for the film.

We spent money on exactly 3 pieces of gear: Harddrives, walkies and a cineped (slider mounted on a tripod).

That cineped did so much work for the $400 dollar rental. It allowed us to have movement without laying a dolly track or having to reset a slider all over our location. Without it we 1000% would not have made our days. It was the only gear our DP requested and it was worth its weight in gold.

All of the other gear was borrowed. Our DP lent us his entire G&E van with every stand, flag, sand bag, light, apple box and anything else we could reasonably need. The camera, a Sony FX6, and the Sony lenses we used were all loaned to us by Cafeteria Films, a company run by my high school friend Carlos, who has also been a long time producing partner of mine and who later helped do some final tweaks to the edit and sound ( because post never seems to end)

About half of the food we fed our team also served as set dec on the film. Our incredible sponsors Padrino’s Restaurant in addition to helping finance the film also donated not only the delicious food you see on screen but lunch for our our cast & crew ( don’t worry we were safe and no one ate food that was sitting out on camera all day). The kids all drank juice boxes and ate cake on screen.

We always knew that our set dec budget would be the biggest spend outside of our team and budgeted $3000 all of which we spent. And then through the magic of returns we got that way down after the shoot. All of our props, set dec and costumes ended up being less that $3000.

I will say that a huge chunk of what we returned were things we bought just in case and never used but some, like the greenery used to divide up the set and cover key areas, are in every shot and then went right back to the store. Do I have some qualms about the ethics of that? yes! Would I rather make returns and spend that money paying our post crew? absolutely! It is thanks to those returns that we were able to afford a composer, among other things, which made all the difference for the film!

And of course in true Miami fashion, this kids party is for all ages, which is why we have the adults drinking donated La Tropical in the scene (no actual drinking occurred) and we had extra cases as set dec around the party (prettier beer cans we couldn’t have asked for nor a better and more supportive sponsor of Miami Film Lab overall!)

Our location was the director’s house. Not only did we shoot there for free but she took care of all the trash, cleanup, etc. And for our one big extras day the couple of people that didn’t fit at the house parked for a few hours at a nearby park for free.

We are just starting our film festival journey so I will write more on that later. For now I will say that of the 12 film festivals we have applied to, every single one of them has waived or deeply discounted our application fee.

All of this is a long winded way of saying we need to embrace the fact that filmmaking is an expensive art form. And it should be. At its best it is taking the talent of dozens if not hundreds of people and creating MAGIC with it. Let’s embrace how hard it is, how much it takes to make something good and stop belittling all that work by ignoring everything that went into making it beyond the cash dolled out.

Stay tuned for a future post on exactly how we raised all that money for Miami Magic

Curious as to how all that money looks on screen? Well, see the film for yourself!

Miami Magic is currently FREE to watch online as part of the Hollyshorts x Film.io Short film Discovery Competition!

You get to watch the film and we get a chance grab an award (and a cash prize) at one of the most prestigious short film festivals in the country!

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