Richard Michaels Stefanik is the fellow who wrote the book – The Megahit Movies – which is used in some of the Writers Guild of America courses. I’m thinking that you can’t really get a better endorsement than that. I’m also thinking that $2500 ain’t gonna get you a Megahit… but maybe a microhit?
He starts off by pointing out that approximately 70,000 scripts poured out of printers in the last year and that it is tough to stand out from that deluge of paper. One way to stand out is to actually produce a movie since there are only about 5000 films made a year. You may still be a small fish but you are in a smaller pond.
He gave us the example of Chris Nolan who made Following with $6000 of his own money… which got him $5 million to make Momento… which got him $46 million to make Insomnia… which in turn got him $135 million to make Batman Begins. Nice career path if you can get it.
He talks about putting your finished movie up on a website that costs about $500 a year… but I wonder how much more expensive that will get if the film actually finds some interest? If you take a 90 minute film and encod it to a reasonable high quality, you end up with at least 250 megabytes – and if your hosting service only allows 200 gigabytes per month of bandwidth (not unusual) the movie can only be downloaded 800 times before you either get your site shut down or they send you a big bill.
He doesn’t mention it but you might want to look at putting it up on Google Video if you don’t want to get smacked for exceeding your bandwidth allotment. You can also look to iTunes… when they are ready for someone other than big networks and studios.
He is putting his money and time where his mouth is and has produced Henry Dodd for less than $2500. It has aired at least ten times on east coast television and he is now going to chunk it up and put it up on the Internet.
He looks at the overhead projection he is using for his presentation graphics and rethinks the numbers. He feels that $1900 could get you a 90 minute movie today and he will have to revise the numbers.
“Your first movie will be a throwaway.”
I never meant for the pilot for Ragnarok the Series to be the one that goes to air, it was to be a selling tool for the series and for my writing. It also cost about ten times what he is talking about… but then I went crazy with locations, actors, FX and action… I knew the error of my ways going in so that rule breaking was entirely deliberate. That said, I won’t be throwing out the pilot I shot, I want to put it up on the Internet some time in the next few months… when I get the time to edit it correctly. Everyone who volunteered their time deserves the best show that I can create… but they also shouldn’t have to wait two years to get it either.
Mr. Stafanik isn’t entirely up on the tech side of things and he should pay a visit to HD for Indies for an refresher course. He feels that you would need to spend over $2000 for a dual-core G5 even for editing miniDV… now I’m not a Mac guy but I’m pretty sure that anything they sell right now will handle miniDV… and Apple’s iLife comes with iMovie HD to edit it with. I’d put even money that a Mac mini will allow you to edit an HD feature with that same iMovie HD… just don’t expect to do any realtime work- I suspect that there will be a lot of waiting for it to render.
He didn’t mention AVID FreeDV which would be a good tool to get started with. Actually, you could put together a nice little suit with FreeDV for video editing and their subsidiary Digidesign Pro Tools Free for audio editing… their Softimage used to have a free 3D tool but that seems to have been discontinued in favour of a free game mod tool.  Since they bought Pinnacle, they have a bunch of cheap editing tools to sell for under a hundred bucks and that leaves them with a decision to make – do they drop Pinnacle’s entry level tools or do they drop their free entry level software? My take is that they will orphan their two free tools off alongside the Softimage free edition.
Frankly, I don’t know why they even bought Pinnacle since it would have cost a hell of a lot less to just code a couple new packages if they wanted to extend their line – and there has to be more cost effective ways to buy a potential customer list. I can’t really see where the purchase of Pinnacle will help anyone, customer or company. Kind of like how Adobe bought Macromedia rather than say- Newtek… why buy duplicates of what you already have rather than extend your line of products? I guess if you figure that the competition is too good, you could buy them out rather than try to make better products.
Mr. Stefanik barely touches on the most important part of making a $2500 movie – writing a script that can actually be made for that amount. This might be due to time constraints and the fact that it will be different for everyone depending on your resources.

The following is my thinking so don’t blame it on R.M. Stefanik.

My take on it is that you need to carefully look over what resources you have available and then write a script that makes the most out of that. First off, what can you do? What skills can you bring to the project for zero dollars? If you can act, do makeup, create wardrobe or props… this will all add value without adding to the bottom line. If you are a special fx guru then a monster or horror movie might be doable with what you have sitting around the house… while everyone else couldn’t touch it with five times the budget.
Then, what can your friends do? Can they run a camera? Can they show up with two dozen home baked muffins for craft service? Can they do computer graphics? Now be careful with this and don’t take advantage of people, make sure that they know exactly what you are doing and what they will be getting out of this.
What are their expectations? My late friend Derek Rama made sure that I knew the importance of that question. People sometimes hear what they want to hear… and it may not be what you meant to say. Ask them exactly and explicitly what they are expecting from the project. It may be your undying gratitude or it may be fame and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. One you can promise while the other you can’t… make absolutely clear which one it is.
And what about locations? Maybe all you have is a one bedroom apartment. Maybe you have a cabin on a lake with access to an abandoned shoe factory. To maximize production values you will want to write a film that makes as much use of the location(s) as you can. Keep in mind that careful camera blocking and set dressing can make one location into two, three or even four locations. Not only will this make the most use of one location, it means that you don’t have to move and that is something to avoid. On my pilot, we used the office of our lead actor‘s wife to stand in for three separate offices. Shane, our key grip/gaffer, let us use his house and it stood in for three separate houses. You wouldn’t believe how much trouble, time and money that saved.
How much time are you going to have to do all this? If you are trying to get it done in three shooting days over a long weekend you will have to minimize action, set decorating or relocations. If you will be doing it over the next eight months of weekends then you can use a different location every one of those weekends. Also keep in mind how much time you are asking people to dedicate to this project. It is one thing to ask someone for an eight month commitment when you are giving them a big fat paycheck- and an entirely different thing when you are offering cold muffins and your undying gratitude. The shorter the commitment, the easier it is to get people to sign on… and always keep in mind that even with the best of intentions, someone saying that they will be there for you over the next eight months doesn’t mean that they will be. Everything from a family crisis to simple loss of interest can cost you your lead actor or a primary location half way through your shoot leaving you with a movie that can’t be finished.

Okay, that ends my interlude and we go back to Mr. Stefanik.

He has a good idea about using your local high school. Most of them have a drama class that puts on a few plays through the year and he suggests that you go there and talk them into making a movie instead of a play. You offer to produce it and that will give you access to what should be an enthusiastic group of people, a longer term commitment from these people, a possible budget increase and at least a few locations.
I’ve been mulling over a spoof on creature-features and that would probably work perfectly with a high school cast and location. It is too late in the current year but if I were to go that route, I should probably contact the drama department at the Lakes District Secondary School and lay some groundwork for the next school year.
This was a good session, especially for those who haven’t dug into it as deeply as I have. I learned a few things and that is all I ask of a session.
He doesn’t really cover what happens once the shooting and editing is all done so once more I will jump in and add to what he has talked about. (you’ll notice that I do this a lot, everything on this website goes through a clint-filter)
So we end up with a $2500 feature length movie… and then run headlong into the distribution brick wall. Except for a vanishing small number of these micro budget movies, making money from them isn’t really in the cards (yet). This means we should be looking at the spectrum of free on through cheap distribution methods.
The first distribution method is one he did give cursory coverage to and that is to set up a website yourself and upload the finished project to it. This gives you full control of the aesthetics of the site but will work only as long as you don’t get hit with a lot of interest. Unless you are paying for some serious hosting, it is usually good for only a couple hundred downloads a month. You could easily run out of your allotted bandwidth and your hosting service will probably pull your site off the Internet and/or hit you with a big surcharge.
The two biggest name places that host and distribute your movie over the Internet are the aforementioned Google Video or iTunes.
Google Video is free up until you pass a certain bandwidth and then they start charging a fee to download it. It is a way to throttle the bandwidth without cost to you or having it completely offline. The complications will ensue as the lawyers and unions start arguing about commercial use and income. Someone is profiting from the work of the cast and crew so the unions will probably demand a percentage. I used UBCP actors on my shoot, it would have been far poorer if I hadn’t. They have a fair contract for volunteer acting gigs which stipulates that if the project makes any money they get ten percent. This is all fine and good but Google is a new and very gray area. If Google makes money and I don’t make a cent… do I owe the actors money? These questions have yet to be answered and unions don’t have a record for flexibility.
Apple on the other hand seems adamant that nobody from the indie community will make money… so they might be a safer choice in that respect. I don’t know how long Apple will allow you to keep your movie up there or how many times they will allow it to be downloaded. It probably depends on how well they can spin it to the artsy folk who are their key marketing demographic. The self congratulatory 16-34 artists with an inflated sense of their own opinion… they are Apple’s bitch. Oh, of course that doesn’t mean you… you are just a discriminating connoisseur of fine tools who groks that Apple is the greatest company ever and that their hardware and software is faster, easier, and more capable than Windoze… plus everyone knows that Bill Gates uses children in developing countries to make Microsoft products out of ground up puppies. And that Apple logo tattooed on the small of your back is just the normal expression of loyalty to the company that originated everything good in computers.
One thing about all this content becoming available online, I see a need for content programmers who scour the material out there and set up websites, a podcasts or RSS feeds that are analogous to TV Guide… it might even be TV Guide. If they know what is good for them they will be developing iTV Guide before someone else takes their lunch money.