2 major mistakes that will ruin your movie overnight
There are many ways to see how to save money, and sometimes you need to spend more at the beginning to save more at the end. This is true for the two main things that will leave your movie overnight.
Mistake # 1- FOOD. Have you ever been at work and hungry? When you’re hungry, it’s all you can think about. As a resourceful filmmaker, you’ve probably made deals with people to work for for very little money, if not free, to help you achieve your creative vision. After a couple of 16-hour days, people start to lose steam. The only thing that keeps people going and also lets them know that you care about their well-being is food. DO NOT be cheap. Little bags of potato chips for snacks and pizza or sandwiches for lunch every day are NOT great! Send a message that you want favors from people, but don’t care enough to feed them well. Take some of the money you saved by hiring cheap crew and spending it on food. There are a million caterers and restaurants and if you take the time to beg them for a deal, chances are someone comes up with something affordable and you look like the hero. My partner and I just finished shooting a low budget movie on a mountain in Topanga, Canyon, California. Driving up the mountain was half an hour, so losing someone for more than an hour a day to take care of lunch was not profitable for us as we were understaffed. In pre-production, we asked some of our key team if they could recommend a caterer they liked. Movie catering isn’t cheap, but we think “what the heck” it doesn’t hurt to ask someone to work with us on our tight budget. I called a vendor who was known for gourmet and healthy food and explained our low budget situation, but told him I wanted to build the relationship as our movie budgets got higher and higher. Would you be willing to work with us on the numbers for the first movie? They agreed, and we were heroes every day at lunch with our team who continually thanked us for having great snacks and meals. For $ 10 per person, they delivered and prepared the food. They brought out two hot meats and a hot vegetarian option that changed daily, as well as a spicy side dish and fresh salad with homemade dressings and garnishes. The meal included a dessert, coffee with the garnishes, and a gourmet lemonade or iced tea. With all that food, he cut down on what we spent on snacks and drinks, as well as saved gas by sending someone to pick up lunch and losing a production assistant. Our team moved much faster and more efficiently knowing that we also cared enough about them to plan good meals. One of our famous actors approached the caterer and asked for a business card. He was a vegetarian and said that most movies forget about non-carnivores and he usually has to choose from the side dishes to try and create a meal. Then he came over and thanked the producers.
Mistake # 2- PRIVATE OWNED EQUIPMENT: It is very tempting to make a deal with someone to lower your rate and rent their equipment in return. We have done this deal many times on low budget equipment and sometimes it works. BUT, when it doesn’t work, this initial money saving could cost you THOUSANDS. We were shooting in the middle of the night for exterior scenes and had rented a generator from our technician to power all the additional lighting. Around 3 a.m., the generator stopped running and all the lights went out. Since we rented the genny to an individual, he did not have an emergency helpline or technical staff on standby to go out and fix or replace the genny. We were screwed up and literally shut down for the night as this was our last day of shooting and we didn’t need any more scenes. We had made specific agreements with the actors on how many days they would work and now we had to go back to their agents to try to get them for another night shoot and resolve all the scheduling conflicts. Since we had SAG actors, we still had to pay them for the whole night. It was a nightmare and in the end we did NOT save money on our cheap genny.
For more tips, visit http://www.indiefilmseminars.com.
