Make a Feature Film for Under $500

There are 3 important things to have when writing your feature film.
1. A Story that grips the audience throughout.
2. A story that can be made to the limits of your low budget
3. A story that you can write quickly, so you can do what you really want to do - make the film.

Luckily there is a lot of help for these three problems.

1. Gripping story

Look through your DVD collection. Read the back of the DVDs and see how the film is described in just 2 sentences. Which ones really give you a taste for the film? Look especially at films with a high concept hook, a story that is unique and exciting. Examples include Sky High, Phone Booth and Creep.

Books about creative thinking give a lot of exercises that you can use to come up with the distinctive hook for your film.

Recommended are The Mind Gym, and Creative thinking by Edward de Bono.

Exercises usually involve ‘vomiting’ out as many random ideas as you and your friends can for 10 minutes. At this stage there are no wrong ideas- you focus your energy on generating ideas, not criticizing them.

When you have 100 ideas you can start to judge them, develop them and combine them to come up with 3 or 4 great ideas.

Now you need to turn your raw hook into a full screenplay.

Read Syd Field's "Screenplay". It describes the prefect blue print of a captivating film. One of the key ideas is to have a big twist at 15 minutes into the film, and another one about 15 minutes from the end.

It is amazing to notice how many great films use this.

To add detail to your blue print; you can get inspired by the great dialogue of Juno or Pulp Fiction. Watch films such as Three Kings or Rushmore to see how small unimportant details add to the movie.

2. Low budget Limits

Before you get too far, remember that you are going to make this film for less than $1000. So, intergalactic laser battles are probably not going to look very good.

You need to know what you have, and what you can get. Do you have access to a bizarre location? Is one of your friends good at computer animation? Will your dad lend you his Ferrari (no!)? Can you do impressions of all the presidents? Anything that you can use for free that will add value to your movie is worth including into your story.

The guerrilla’s film makers guide has a brilliant section on writing to low budget limits.

One of the tips is to set about a third of you story in one set, so you can get a large chunk of filming done quickly.

An excellent example of writing to limits is the film Cube. The filmmakers only had one set, so wrote a story about a prison made of thousands of identical cubes. Using different colored lights this one set became 1000s of different rooms.

The film was very successful, spawned sequels and has great characters in it.

3. Write quickly

If you were looking to sell your screenplay on its own you would spend about 2 years wiring and rewriting it. This is also true if you were making a 2 million dollar movie from it.

But you are different, the super-low budget means you can start filming right away, you don’t need to spend time looking for investors. You want to make a film NOW.

You can read How to Write a Movie in 21 Days: The Inner Movie Method by Viki King.

Or, you can follow Larry David’s or Christopher Guest’s method of using improvisation.

You write a detailed story outline (remembering the big twists to keep interest) and write detailed character biographies for each character.

When filming the actors then know what they have to do in a scene, but can use there own words rather than using scripted dialogue. This adds freshness to a scene; but can be challenging for the actors, and can be difficult to edit together.

Watch Curb your Enthusiasm and Best in Show, and see if improvisation is suitable for your team.

My own comedy film, Horror! was written using improvisation to allow quick filming, and meant that actors could start straight away, without memorizing a script.

Using these methods you will be able to make a story that is gripping, cheap to make, and ready to film.