I discussed this project with my friend Stephen, who’s going to be creating a Capstone next semester, and we’ve decided to collaborate: I’m going to write a script, and he’s going to film it. This makes going forward a lot less complicated, except for the business of deciding what I should be writing. But whatever the finished product should be at this point, I know it has to be filmable by someone with a very low-budget, and I’ve decided to start my research from there. (My entry in Screenwriting class was rejected for filming elsewhere because it was so intensely high-budget, so this is a weakness I direly need to shore up.)
The best resource I’ve found thus far on dealing with penniless-filmmaking is an online article in the magazine Script, written by Clive Davies-Frayne and entitled “Four Ways to Control Your Script’s Budget Without Compromising the FIlm”. It makes some points that were pretty obvious to me, like that you should film all of a location’s scenes all at once at that location, but also some that I’d never thought of, like that defining all your locations from the beginning saves time and effort compared to writing location-independent scenes that could be filmed anywhere. Some of it is based in the idea that the reader will actively be paying actors, and the slightly optimistic note that big names sometimes take on small roles for less money if the productions are interesting enough, but the meat of it is in its advice on making the most of your locations and not just writing long scenes to cover up a dearth of places to go. (This is one of the lucky things about writing a screenplay being shot somewhere you’ve spent four years living in.)
The article also lists items in the manifesto of Dogme95, a film movement started by Lars von Trier & co. in Denmark, the same year I was born. The manifesto forbids things like nondiegetic sound, props not found on location and complicated lighting, and styles itself as a vow of chastity on traditional means of directing. I’d heard of the movement through clicking through random Wikipedia articles a year ago, but I never really understood what they were trying to achieve; looking at it as a money-saving measure the way Davies-Frayne does, the whole thing comes together. However, it also forbids genre movies, and there are some things I’m not sure I’m willing to give up in this as-yet-unconceived script of mine.
Moving forward from here, I’ve found a bunch of guidebooks on writing low-budget scripts, and I know where to find the script of at least one of my all-time favorites, but once I have a concrete direction I’m going in I could take a deeper dive into the films and traditions my work will be trying to descend from.
Work Cited
Davies-Frayne, Clive (2013, Jan 18). Alt Script: Four Ways to Control Your Script’s Budget Without Compromising the Film. Retrieved from http://www.scriptmag.com/features/alt-script-four-ways-to-control-your-scripts-budget-without-compromising-the-film
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