SYS Podcast Episode 544 – How To Make a Micro-Budget Feature Film with Ashley Scott Meyers (transcript)

This is a transcript of SYS Podcast Episode 544 – How To Make a Micro-Budget Feature Film with Ashley Scott Meyers.

Welcome to episode 544 of the Selling Your Screenplay podcast. I’m Ashley Scott Meyers, screenwriter and blogger over at sellingyourscreenplay.com.

Today, I am going to be talking about producing my own micro-budget feature film. I’ll just be talking through every step of the way, writing the low-budget screenplay, raising the money, finding crew, casting locations, food, insurance, everything I did as a producer I’m just going to run through quickly in this episode. So hopefully at the end of it, you can go out and produce your own micro-budget film. So, stay tuned for that.

SYS’s Six Figure Screenplay Contest is open for submissions. Just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com slash contest. So, if your script is ready, definitely submit now to save some money. We’re looking for low-budget shorts and features. I’m defining low-budget as less than six figures, in other words, less than 1 million US dollars. We’ve got lots of industry judges reading scripts in the later rounds. We’re giving away thousands of dollars in cash. Our grand prize winner is going to win $1,000 and get some exposure for those scripts. We have a short film script category as well. 30 pages or less. So, if you have a low-budget short script, by all means, submit that. If you want to submit to the contest or learn more about it or check out who some of our industry judges are, just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/contest. And again, our next deadline is May 31st.

If you find this episode valuable, please help me out by giving me a review in iTunes or leaving a comment on YouTube or retweeting the podcast on Twitter or liking or sharing it on Facebook. These social media shares really do help spread word about the podcast, so they’re very much appreciated. Any websites or links that I mention in the podcast can be found on my blog in the show notes. I also publish a transcript with every episode in case you’d rather read the show or look at something later on. You can find all the podcast show notes at www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/podcast. And then just look for episode 544. If you want my free guide how to sell screenplay in five weeks, you can pick that up by going to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/guide. It’s completely free. Just put in your email address and I’ll send you a new lesson once per week for five weeks along with a bunch of bonus lessons. I teach the whole process of how to sell your screenplay in that guide, how to write a professional logline and query letter, how to find agents, managers, and producers who are looking for material. Really, it’s everything you need to know to sell your screenplay. Just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/guide.

Today’s main segment is going to be me talking about all of the various things I did as the producer of my micro budget rom-com. So we’re in post on the film. I just watched another cut this past weekend. It’s coming along nicely. I can’t wait to get it finished and get it out into the world. So that’s all very exciting. While my editors have been busy putting this cut together, I’ve been creating marketing materials for the film. I’m gearing up for the Kickstarter, which we’re going to run starting May 11th. I’m going to run it for two weeks. So in just a week after this podcast publishes, the Kickstarter will be live. What I’ve done is create a whole series of short form videos where I talk about one specific item like casting the film. It’s like a five-minute video on how I cast the film. And then I uploaded all of these videos to TikTok and YouTube and all of the other platforms. The goal is simple. I’m trying to just start building some awareness for the film and getting people excited about it. Obviously, that will lead into the Kickstarter and then hopefully lead into the actual release of the film. So, you can check out all of these short form videos on TikTok and YouTube, Instagram, X, Facebook. I even posted them on LinkedIn. So I’m slowly releasing these, one video a day right up until May 11th, as I said when we launched our Kickstarter.

What I thought I would do today on the podcast, since this is a much longer format, is just run through all of these various topics in one place so you don’t have to track down all of these short videos. I do go into some more detail on the specific videos. It’s literally hours of content. I mean, I’ve got over 20 videos, five minutes each. So there’s quite a bit of detail on all of these various topics. So this is going to be a little bit more of a summary, but the goal here is, or what I’m trying to do is just show people how it’s really not rocket science to make a micro-budget feature film. So. I’m just going to run through all of the various steps and just kind of explain how I did them. And again, if you want a little more detail, definitely go and track down the actual videos on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and everywhere else.

So, the first step to creating a micro-budget film is obviously writing the screenplay. And this podcast is all about screenwriting. So that’s really the first step to all of this. I wrote this screenplay many years ago and have updated it over the years. But it’s a script that I wrote really with some intention to do low budget. I wrote it, you know, over 20 years ago. I think now at this point, it was the early 2000s. And so, I wasn’t necessarily thinking about producing it myself, but I was thinking about producing something low budget. So I knew to keep it contained with a small number of characters. A lot of it is intuition. When you’re writing the script, just take a minute to just step back and think it through, you know, is this going to be an expensive scene to shoot? Just think of a little bit just logistically like a producer. And most of it’s pretty intuitive. You know, large crowd scenes takes a lot of people. And, you know, crowd scenes, it’s not just, oh, I can get my friends to come for free. We did a couple of big scenes here, especially one scene in our climax of this film where we had a bunch of extras. And I’ll explain how I got all those extras. And they did a fantastic job. They’re all real actors. It was an incredible experience. But one thing you got to remember with a low budget script or a low budget film is it’s not just about getting the people there. That’s obviously difficult getting people there for next to no money or no money in some cases. So that’s not an easy ask for one to get a lot of people there. But the other thing is, is just logistically, it becomes very difficult to manage this many people when you’ve got 20 actors and 15 crew. That’s a lot that you got to manage. So it’s just obviously it’s expensive to feed those people to have all those people in your set. It just adds to the cost of it.

So that’s my biggest piece of advice. Just use your intuition. Think it through as a producer. Just as you’re writing a scene, as you’re coming up with script ideas, you know, stuff that takes place in contemporary settings, contemporary houses, apartments, all that sort of stuff is very, very intuitive. So specifically, to my film, I would say are sort of our read actually the actual log line and you can have so you can understand sort of the story – “When ‘I want to be social media influencer’ bartender meets a know what she wants pre law student. Their chemistry ignites a red-hot romance. Unfortunately, she thinks it’s a summer fling while he falls madly in love.” Just imagine 500 days of summer but set in a bar and with a modern social media angle.

So that’s the story. It all takes place in a bar. I didn’t know the bar owner when I started this, but I sort of figured I could probably find a bar that I could rent for a week to shoot in and I was able to do that. So again, those are just sort of the intuitive leaps you might have to take. What can you shoot? What can you get? If you got to shoot on a space station, even if it’s just one room on a space station, you still got to build that set and you still got to come up with costumes. So, keeping it contained definitely a good idea, but I would say even more important than keeping contained, keeping it contemporary stuff where the actors can use their own clothes. We can use modern cars. We can go into stores and restaurants and bars in our case. We don’t have to do a lot of set dressing because we’re using a contemporary setting.

The name of my film is Lynda Flynn and it actually comes from a girl that I had a crush on in my very first job at the Annapolis Chart House when I was a teenager. I just always thought that the name had a ring to it, Lynda Flynn, and it spelled L-Y-N-D-A. So, it’s got two Y’s and a Y in the L or a Y in the Linda and a Y in the Flynn. So, I just thought it was a cool name and always sort of remembered that experience. I’ve worked in bars and restaurants. As I said, I worked my very, very first job really was at the Annapolis Chart House working as a dishwasher and I worked up a little bit there, but they had a bar. Obviously, they’re a big restaurant. So just being around that world, I’ve had other jobs in bars and restaurants as well over the years. So just knowing that world and sort of being familiar with that world was very, very helpful and I think it can give you a little bit of authenticity. A lot of the relationships, the romantic comedy, a lot of this stuff comes from my own dating experience here in LA when I first got here. So all of this was a very personal story for me.

As I said, we kept the cast small. It’s a romance. Really, it’s the two main actors are in almost every scene, certainly our lead actor. I think he’s in like 99 percent. There’s maybe one scene that he’s not in, but he’s in pretty much all the other scene and then our female lead is in probably 85 percent of the scene. So it was really a small crew and it was really working with those two actors, but it starts with the writing, having that script that’s low budget and just condensed and as condensed as possible, as few actors as possible, as simple as sets as possible, things that you can get, you know, I would say, too, you can add production value by using the things that you know you have access to. And you know, I had I live in Los Angeles. We shot in here, shot around here so I could use my house. My mom has a house here. We were able to shoot there. So, I just and I and I knew this going into the production. Again, a lot of these sets, all the sets are just contemporary apartments, houses, you know, the bar. They go to a store, all things that I felt like I could get fairly easily. And that’s, I’d say, the biggest piece of advice is just put on your producer hat when you’re writing the script and just think through, you know, how would I go if I was the producer? How would I go about and get this stuff? Even if you don’t want to be the producer, it’s good to sort of be aware of that, you know, and it could make, you know, if you write your script to be shot, you’re really conscious of these things. Even if you don’t produce the script yourself, a producer will be more interested in it because they can produce it more easily. Anyways, that’s the screenplay.

So, once you have a screenplay, and I rewrote it many, many times, you did many, many drafts over the course of several years, I polished this screenplay up and hopefully made it as good as I can possibly make it. But once you have a screenplay that you like, you feel like you can shoot, then it’s a matter of raising the money. Obviously, you have to have some idea about how much things are going to cost so you can at least do a preliminary budget so you know what you’re going to be able to raise. I have enough experience. I don’t really break the script down in like a budget. Like I don’t go through it line by line and really create like an itemized budget. I sort of just have a basic understanding we’re going to need these locations and this. So I created a very preliminary budget and it’s actually online if you want to check it out. If you go to lyndaflynfilm.com and click on ‘About’, I actually have the budget right there linked. You can also download the whole screenplay as well. But again, that’s lyndaflynfilm.com just so you can go there and check out the budget and the full screenplay. But the bottom line is the budget for this film is $35,000 and I personally put in half of that $18,000 is my money.

So, the question is then how did I raise that other $17,000? And I had three investors that made up about $12,000. So that gets us to about $30,000. And then we’re going to do a Kickstarter and that’ll be the last five or $6,000. That’ll get us to the $35,000 that we need to finish the film.

Interestingly, the three investors that were in this film are all people that I met through Selling Your Screenplay, doing this podcast. They’re people that just reached out to me and I got to know over the years. So that’s something to really think about.

Tony, who I worked with on my last film, The Rideshare Killer, he’s a retired doctor. He always wanted to produce some films. He started developing some scripts, and that’s how he ran across my podcast. And this was years ago, as I said. I met him before we did The Rideshare Killer. He was one of the producers on that project as well.

So I just have gotten to know some of these producers through Selling Your Screenplay, some of these partners and financiers through Selling Your Screenplay.

Greg is another one of the financiers, and he really helped a lot in the development of the script. He was the one that was really pushing me to keep rewriting it and go through it.

And then Scott is our third investor, and he’s actually come on board as a music supervisor. He has a background in music. He’s got a lot of connections with bands and stuff. So he’s actually been obviously invested a little bit of money, but he’s been really helping us just choose the music. And there is some logistics to this, you know, listening or watching the cuts and figuring out what music goes where, reading the script.

And as I said, he’s got a lot of connections with bands and stuff. So we’ve got a lot of great original music that we’re going to be using in this, and that’s due to Scott.

But the biggest point that I’m trying to make here is that you’re sometimes just doing something like what I’m doing with this podcast. And I’ve been doing it obviously for years. I’ve met a lot of people through it.

But creating something where you become sort of an authority and you start having people contact you is not a bad way to find financiers. This is not a five-minute solution. It’s not going to be easy.

You know, obviously I’ve invested, you know, at this point I think it’s over 10 years I’ve been doing this podcast. So you’ve got to invest some time in it. But it is a good way to meet people that are really interested in what you’re doing.

You know, if you don’t like me or you don’t think what I’m doing is interesting, you don’t watch my podcast. So the people that are watching my podcast, just by definition, there’s at least some interest in what I’m doing.

And so those are good people to network with and to get to know.

I would say if you’re looking to start something like that, you know, you don’t have 10 years to start a podcast, you know, just getting involved in the local film community can get you meeting people.

You know, get out there, start doing shorts, just start getting out there and meeting people is really probably the biggest piece of advice to finding investors.

There’s not really an ROI on something like this. I mean, hopefully, we make our money back. Hopefully, we make a ton of money. Hopefully, this thing takes off as success. But most of these small micro budget films, you know, if they make a little bit of money, they break even, you know, you’re doing pretty well with it. So, you know, the question is, how do you pitch investors on this? And as I said, I pitched these investors really on just the experience of making a cool independent film. As I said, Tony, it was just he’s a retired doctor. He wants to produce films. He thinks it would be a cool thing to be a part of. So he’s happy to come in, invest a little bit of money, get a producer credit, and frankly, learn, you know, he learns a lot. Each one of these films we do, he’s gotten to really see it firsthand and be a part of the process. And as I said, with Scott, he’s come on and done the music and just been a part of the process. So hopefully, I’m including, you know, these investors and giving them something that they that that they want and that they like, without necessarily promising that they’re going to make millions of dollars, invest a little money, you’re going to make millions of dollars. I hope it happens, but that’s probably not going to happen. So how can you offer value to people, which is not necessarily just a straight return on investment ROI. I do have a deal memo in place with the investors.

Me and Tony are co-owners of our of our LLC, the rideshare killer company. We set up an LLC for that film. We’ve kept it going. So we produced this film under that same LLC. But Tony handles all of the paperwork and legal stuff. So I’m not going to speak to that on this. But you definitely do want to talk to a lawyer that understands these types of things, because this is important stuff. I mean, you know, if the movie doesn’t make any money, I suppose it’s not. But you want to have this stuff buttoned up. And this is I’m not a lawyer. I don’t you know, I don’t pretend to be a lawyer. So, this is not advice that you can take in terms of the legal agreement that was in the deal memo. I’m trying to just give basic an overview. And frankly, I don’t handle a lot of it. So I’m not even really the best person to ask. Because as I said, Tony is the one that’s handled really most of if not all of this, the legal paperwork on both the films, the Rideshare Killer and this one. So definitely vet your deal memo, talk to a lawyer and make sure that you’ve got that all figured out.

Once again, check out our website, LyndaFlynnfilm.com. You can check out the preliminary budget and the screenplay.

So, once you have your screenplay and then you have your financing in place, the next thing that I did was start to secure my locations. Now, this is, you can start to get crew, you can start to get locations, you can start to get cast. You know, there’s no set order. I think actually I probably reached out to Bernie, my cinematographer. He is the fellow who shot the Pinch. So, I already knew him and I’ve been in touch with him. He might’ve been the first person because I contacted him pretty early because I knew that that was an important piece. But the locations were the next piece that I really started working on in earnest in terms of filling this film out. And part of that was because I knew the bar was absolutely, it was essential to doing this movie. I didn’t have a bar, I didn’t have a movie. I had to get a cool bar and I had to have that for this movie. So, I didn’t really want to spend a lot of time on this until I had that bar lined up. And so that’s what I did.

I started going out, looking at bars. There’s a variety of sources. Oh, and one other little thing. So people, again, you can check out the actual budget on our website, lyndaflynnfilm.com. But just for your reference, the total budget’s about $35,000. $5,000 of that $35,000 was devoted to locations. And I’ll break that down a little bit further. If you really have any, if people have questions about it, I can certainly break that down a little further. But this bar, we needed it for six days. And the pitch that I made to the bar owner was that we wouldn’t be there while they were open. So I needed to find a bar that opened at two or three in the afternoon and closed at one or two in the morning. So then we could go in there when they’re closed and shoot our movie. It wouldn’t interrupt because I knew I didn’t have a lot of money to pay this person. So we could go in there and shoot and it wouldn’t cost them any money. And so that was part of my pitch.

So I just, I went on Gigster and Pier Space and that’s gigster.com, pierspace.com. And those are, at least in LA, those are very active websites for finding locations to do a film shoot or any kind of a photo shoot, any kind of a shoot at. So, I used those, I found a couple of bars, nothing I really, really liked. So I started just looking around my area and eventually found the garage bar up in Ventura, which is about 30 minutes from my house. So not a quick, quick drive, but it was the perfect bar. The guy, Dave is the owner of this guy named Dave Rhodes. And as I said, I just found his website, just Googling bars in the area and found his website. And it just, it was something about his website. He’s a little artistic himself. So it just, and it just seemed very grassroots. He’s on his website. Hey, this is my neighborhood bar. And so it just seemed like a cool guy that might actually be interested in shooting or having a indie film come and shoot at his location.

So I emailed him, and he texted me right back. I pitched him again on what I said before: we were only going to be there when they were closed. I also told him this was a micro-budget film, so it wasn’t going to be a huge crew. It was going to be a four-man crew, anywhere from two to maybe ten actors. We had one day with extras, but the other days were going to be two, three, four, or five actors. So I explained that this wasn’t going to be a big inconvenience for him.

In that original email I sent, I also told him I could pay him $3,000. So I paid him $500 a day for six days, which totaled $3,000. Again, our total location budget was $5,000, so this was more than half of our location budget.

But again, this was really one of the key locations — not one of, this was the key location in the film. So that’s where we directed a lot of the money.

The other locations I got — I did get one location off of Peerspace, Kalua Coffee up in Moorpark. We made it look like a restaurant. It was a cool location. We were there for four hours.

Then I found a little store, a little boutique store called Eileen’s Boutique in Oak Park. I’m in Agoura Hills, California, and Oak Park is a little north of us, maybe ten minutes from my house, so pretty close by.

Again, I just pitched them. I don’t think I had an email, so I had to cold call her — literally just pick up the phone and call her and say, “Hey, Ashley Meyers here. I’m a producer. Would you consider letting us shoot there?”

She was very nice, though a little skeptical. She wanted to meet me. Again, I’m only ten minutes away, so it was no problem. I just drove down there and met her. She was very nice, and she had a partner, Jackie. So it was Eileen and Jackie. I met both of them, and it ended up being Jackie who was there the day of the shoot and helped us out with everything.

Again, it was very much about meeting them in person, them looking at me, me looking at them, and everybody feeling like, “Okay, this is going to be a good fit.” This was a micro-budget film.

So, you know, you’ve got to get in business with people that are not going to give you a hard time. That’s a big part of it. They’ve got to be excited by having a film there. And if they’re just looking for the money or they’re just, you know, it just, that’s not what this is. This is a micro-budget film. There’s not — nobody’s going to make a lot of money off this thing — but it’s a cool thing.

And with the Garage Bar and with Eileen’s Boutique, you know, I said, “Hey, we can shoot your logo. We can shoot your store and sort of advertise it. This can be a great promotional piece for you.” And both of them were into that as well.

So you’ll see in the finished film, the Garage Bar — he’s got all kinds of signage. I mean, the bar looks cool. And as I said, Dave, he just has sort of an artistic bent. He’s got sort of a good eye for, frankly, production design.

So he really has turned this neighborhood bar into just — it’s just a really cool set. So we didn’t have to do a lot of production design or anything like that. But again, it just worked for the film, and he was excited to have us.

And that’s the other thing I would say: when I was on Peerspace and Giggster, I would go and look. Like Eileen’s Boutique, as I said, was up in Oak Park. But when I — as a middle-aged dude who buys all my clothes at Target and Costco — I didn’t even know that these little boutique stores existed. And come to find out, they’re all over.

But I found one of these in Burbank, which is about, you know, 50 minutes from my house — Burbank, California. And I found one on Peerspace, and I went and looked at it, and it didn’t really work. It wasn’t quite right. I could maybe make it work. It was a cool little boutique. But then I started to think, man, there’s got to be some of these closer to my house.

But the people in LA — I also looked at some theaters. That was the other big rental location: theaters. And the theaters were extremely difficult to deal with, which is bizarre. Because you would think a bunch of starving actors doing theater in LA would love to have an indie film come and shoot at their theater. But that’s just not the case.

They’re just very, very — and same thing with this store in Burbank — as you talk to the people that are sort of more in Hollywood, more in downtown LA, they’re just much more jaded. They’ve done a lot more productions. They’re not, you know, sort of in awe of the mystique of having a film there. So they just want to charge you money, and they charge you extra.

And they’ve got all these rules: you can’t do this. If you want to do this, you got to pay extra. If you want to shoot in this bathroom, you got to pay extra. You go up these stairs, you got to pay extra.

So it was just a very — it just wasn’t a great experience. And again, this is micro-budget. We need people that are going to be able to, you know, kind of roll with some punches. Things are not always going to go exactly as planned, and we don’t have any money. You know, just like, make it up.

So I just needed people that could sort of roll with those situations. And I found the further I got from LA and Hollywood — so again, I live in Agoura Hills, which is a very, very far suburb of Los Angeles. In fact, I’m at the edge of the LA County line, and we’re almost in Ventura.

And as I said, this bar, the Garage Bar, is actually in Ventura. Eileen’s Boutique is in Oak Park, which is ten minutes from my house. But I think that’s actually in Ventura County, not LA County.

So that’s another thing: if you don’t live in LA, it’s going to be harder to find actors, but locations should be much, much easier. You should be able to find some really cool locations and people that are excited to have you shooting there.

So that’s, I’d say, the biggest piece of advice: look around at what locations you can get that have cool production value, that look cool, and try and, you know, think about how you can incorporate those into your script.

But the locations definitely can be a challenge because there’s a lot — you know, without a lot of money. If you have money, then it’s never quite that big of a challenge. But when you don’t have a lot of money, it is a challenge. And some of it just, you know, it’s going to come down to sort of your ability to just talk and charm the people that own these locations and get them to agree to let you shoot there for a very little bit of money.

So one thing that you definitely want to think through if you’re doing a micro-budget film is insurance. And there’s two types of insurance.

There’s the liability insurance, which is going to cover — you know, it’s going to cover things breaking, people, you know, the locations if something happens to them, your liability, your equipment, all that sort of stuff.

And then the other piece of insurance is workers’ comp insurance. In case one of your crew or your actors gets hurt, then obviously they need to be plugged into that disability insurance, which is through the workers’ comp if someone gets hurt.

So those two types of insurance, you definitely need, I think.

And I want to be clear here too: this is an overview. I’m just sort of giving people an overview. Have the insurance. I’m not an insurance broker. I’m not in the insurance business. I’m certainly not giving you advice on how to insure your movie. I’m just kind of telling you what I did, and hopefully it will be a guide for you to go and do your own research and to figure out what is appropriate for you.

Obviously different states are different, different locations are different, but I’ll just give you a quick overview of sort of how the insurance went down for us.

So the first thing is the liability insurance. I think it was a little less than $700. I have an insurance broker that I’ve used over the years for a variety of things. Me and my wife have a life insurance policy through this guy. I had some insurance when I did the film festival. I got some insurance through him. So I’ve used him before, happy to recommend him. He’s a nice guy.

So if you need this kind of insurance, you’re welcome to email me and I’ll give you his information: info at sellingyourscreenplay.com.

But for something like this — low-budget insurance like this — you get what’s called event insurance, and it’s pretty standard. Again, don’t quote me on the actual numbers, but roughly it’s like $1 million of coverage per incident and $2 million of total coverage. And that’s just kind of standard.

When you go to rental locations, the locations that have done this before obviously want to make sure that you have insurance and that they’re protected. If you burn their building down, you know, you’ve got some insurance. Not sure $2 million of total coverage would cover most of these buildings in LA, but that’s another story.

But the bottom line is: $1 million / $2 million — that’s very standard. That’s what people are expecting if you’re renting a location.

And what you do is you get what’s called a certificate of insurance, and you put them on as an additionally insured. And that’s super simple. All you do is email your insurance broker and say, “Hey, the Garage Bar — here’s their address — I need them listed as additionally insured.”

And he’ll produce what’s called this COI, certificate of insurance, and then you show that to the location person, and they can verify that you do have the insurance. And it says the $1 million per incident, $2 million total coverage.

Again, this was a little less than $700, but you definitely want to think that through.

We did not have a lot of expensive equipment. I would say all total — I mean, I bought the camera for $1,000 on Craigslist — so I would say all total our equipment was well less than $10,000.

I know the sound guy had some high-end equipment, so I guess that would be covered too. But as I said, we didn’t have tens of thousands of dollars of equipment. I would say if we had $10,000 worth of equipment, that’s probably high. I bet you could replace all of our equipment for less than that.

So those are the things you fill out. You’re going to fill out some paperwork when you’re doing this, and that’s how they arrive at this price of around $700.

This was also a rom-com, so there wasn’t anything dangerous. There were no stunts. Even simple wrestling or punching or shooting a gun with blanks — those all add to the danger.

You know, this is event insurance. So I was very clear to them: yes, we’re shooting at a bar, but we’re not serving alcohol. Hopefully you’re not serving alcohol on your film set either.

But anything like that that could add potential liability to the insurance company and increase their exposure is obviously going to cost you more.

So again, I sent them the script, and they could evaluate the whole thing. But obviously this is a rom-com, so most of it is just two people sitting around talking. There was nothing dangerous about it.

So I’m sure my price was about as low as you’re going to get. I mean, there was nothing dangerous about this film. We didn’t have a lot of equipment. So I can’t imagine it being any cheaper than that.

Maybe different states would be a little bit cheaper. But in any event, your results may vary. It’s going to depend on what you’re doing in your film. That’s how they set the price.

So on the workers’ comp — again, this is what I’ve done numerous times when I’ve gotten insurance for films and stuff. At least here in California, it’s called State Fund. And I think it’s literally statefund.gov.

But if you just Google “State Fund California,” their website will come up. And honestly, for a government website, it’s incredibly efficient and easy to use.

In about ten minutes, you put in some information. You have to find either — they have a code for what kind of business this is — and you have to identify it as film production. So you go through some little steps.

They have a little assistant that pops up on the website, and there seems to be an actual person on the other end that can answer questions.

But the bottom line is, you just go through this online application process. It takes about ten minutes. You put in your information, they give you a quote right there, you put in your credit card, and then you’re covered. And I think that was about $750.

And I think mostly that’s based on payroll, because you tell them how much payroll you’re going to have on your shoot. And obviously we were paying everyone pretty much minimum wage, so our payroll was fairly small.

So again, I’m sure that’s going to affect it — how many people you have and how big the production is. If you’ve got a much bigger production, obviously you tell them how many people you have, you tell them how much payroll, and that’s going to affect the price.

So as I said, ours was about $750. Your results may vary, but it’s a pretty easy form to go through.

I can’t imagine most, I would think most states, I don’t know, as I said, this California one is really pretty well done. It works very, very well. So hopefully your state, if you’re in California, definitely check it out. But hopefully your state has something equivalent. But anyways, that’s the insurance. Again, I know this is micro budget. I know insurance is something people might like to cut corners on, but I would urge you to really think it through. In California, it’s illegal to run a business without workers comp. You’re paying people even minimum wage, you got to have workers comp. I mean, I have not had any injuries. I’ve done three of these micro budget films now. I’ve not had any injuries or any problems. So I think I can say I run a tight ship. We try and do things right and be careful. But unfortunately, things can happen. People can get hurt. So I would be very careful if you’re thinking about not having the workers comp. As I said, in California, it’s straight up illegal, probably illegal in your state as well. So again, this is another thing you really want to talk to someone that’s in the insurance business or a lawyer and really understand what you’re doing. But as I said, I don’t think spending $1,500 of a $35,000 budget is really that bad in terms of getting the insurance. So at least for us, it just seemed like it was very, very much worth it.

OK, so you have your script, you’ve raised your money, you’ve got your locations, you’ve got your insurance. So the next piece of the puzzle was getting a crew. And this is a micro budget film. So obviously it’s a skeleton crew. We needed the bare minimum number of people, and that’s pretty much what we had. So we had a sound guy, we had a cinematographer, and we had sort of a general-use production assistant, you know, PA type of a guy that just did everything. But he was very much centered around helping the cinematographer move equipment, set up lights, move cords, break stuff down, and build stuff back up every day. So he was very much sort of an on-set PA that was helping with the actual production work.

And that was pretty much it for our regular crew. This is a rom com. So we did have some kissing and that sort of stuff. It’s a romance. So these people are in a red hot love affair, so they are kissing and cuddling. And so we had an intimacy coordinator for a couple of days, a lady named Barbara. And so those three positions.

So the cinematographer is a friend of mine, Bernie, who I met through The Pinch. I mentioned that a moment ago. He’s someone I met through Selling Your Screenplay. He did a great job on The Pinch. He’s just a nice guy. We work well together. So it was an easy choice choosing him and trying to bring him on. Luckily he wasn’t doing anything. And the reality is too, he likes doing indie film. People don’t — and this is sort of the thing that I’ll say for all of the people that came onto the crew — people want to do indie films. Nobody gets into this business to do YouTube videos or documentaries or just commercials. That sort of stuff pays the bills. A lot of people in the film business end up doing editing and sound work on infomercials, commercials, YouTube videos, and that sort of stuff. And that’s great and you can make a living. And there’s certainly some fun to all of that, being on set. It’s interesting that every day is different. So there’s a lot of things that can be said for that. But most people get into film to do indie film. They want to do something artistic with some sort of grit.

So that’s sort of what I tried to offer to my crew. So anyways, I got Bernie, as I said, I met him through Selling Your Screenplay. He’s my cinematographer. Jimmy was our sound guy. Literally he calls himself “Sound Guy Jimmy.” That is how he’s branded himself. He is a real sound professional. Like you look him up on IMDb, he’s got dozens of credits. I found him on Craigslist, just put up an ad and he wasn’t doing anything. So again, once he submitted his resume, oh gee, this guy’s got a lot of experience. He seems cool. And we got on the phone, me and Bernie got on a phone call with him. Bernie has also done sound, so Bernie is very technical with all this equipment and knows the sound equipment. And that was one of the things — we needed a sound guy that had his own equipment. This thing’s micro budget, so you kind of got to come with your own sound package, which Jimmy definitely had.

But me and Bernie got on a Zoom call — I think it might’ve just been a phone call — and we chatted with him and he seemed like a nice guy. Seemed like he would be a cool guy to work with. Me and Bernie both liked him, so we hired him.

Tim was our sort of general-use PA, as I said. He did all kinds of stuff on production, helping move equipment, helping Bernie set up lights. And Tim is from Wisconsin. He had just gotten to Los Angeles. And again, someone from Craigslist. I put an ad up, I got on a phone call with him, seemed like a smart guy. But truthfully, I could tell he seemed like a smart guy, a nice guy, just from his original email and resume and stuff.

So he was the only person that I talked to in interviews. Same thing with Sound Guy Jimmy, to be honest with you. Once I’m vetting, you get a lot of resumes because this is micro budget, but we are still paying something to these people. So once you put an ad on Craigslist where you actually are paying a daily rate, you will get inundated with good people. It’s just a matter of vetting them. And both Tim and Jimmy sent in good resumes and good cover letters. And so they were great choices. I would work with all of these people again.

Barbara, our intimacy coordinator, she is a script supervisor by trade, but she has done some intimacy coordinating as well. So again, through Craigslist, I got on a phone call with her and we chatted and she really came on and she’s just a really nice lady. She really made herself a big part of the crew on the two or three days that she was there. So it was great to have her.

I can’t really recommend Craigslist enough. I think in a lot of ways it gets sort of a bad rap because there’s definitely scams there and you definitely have sort of a lot of low-end people on there, but there’s also a lot of high-end people that are just looking for work. And so I recommend Craigslist as a resource, at least here in Los Angeles.

As I said, if you can pay even a minimum wage for film production, you will get absolutely inundated with people. So it’s definitely a resource to kind of think about. If you know people and you’ve worked with them in the past, that’s another great thing. And I’ll talk a little bit more about this with actors, but if you’ve been in the business for a while and you can go on IMDb, you can tell they’ve worked on projects with people that you’ve worked on projects with, so you can potentially vet them that way just by maybe you have some mutual people that you both have worked with and you can contact them. So you definitely need to vet the people on Craigslist. You really need to make sure you’re getting good people because there’s definitely no bar on Craigslist. Anybody can start sending you their resume. So you got to be careful, but I recommend it as a resource for finding a really good and competent crew.

So with casting, I would say the single biggest thing — and this is, I did three of these short-form videos on casting and I just thought it was nice to kind of go through and really thank some and just showcase some of the actors that I’ve worked with on other projects and stuff. So I did use a lot of actors from previous projects, people that I know, people brought on from other projects, and actors that I’ve met over the years, friends that are actors, that sort of stuff. So that was definitely some of it. But, you know, as a middle-aged dude, I don’t know a lot of hip young actors in their twenties now. And that’s who my leads were. The male and female lead are both in their twenties, just recent college graduates.

So I did not have a large reservoir of people to pull from in my own life. I just don’t know that many young actors anymore. So we had to go out and cast a lot of the roles. I would say more than half, maybe three quarters of the roles, we had to go out and actually cast.

And we used a service called Breakdown Express. They’ve been around for decades. They were here in the nineties when I moved to LA. Obviously it wasn’t all online back then, but from top to bottom, they have a great platform. It’s a little antiquated, a little clunky, but they’ve been doing it for years and they’ve got this website. And again, I’d used this for The Pinch and for The Rideshare Killer. The interface hasn’t changed. The Pinch was over 10 years ago. The interface is exactly the same. But I’m saying that it is a little clunky and a little old, but by the same token, once you figure out how to use it, it’s extremely useful. And they’ve really done it for so long, they know what tools you need. So you can run your entire casting process through Breakdown Express. So it’s a great resource if you’re in LA.

I’m sure they have it in New York, probably other cities too, but for sure in LA. And just as an example, so we put up the notice: we need an early twenties woman, early twenties guy. I think we had over 2000 submissions for the role of Linda Flynn, the female lead. And I think that was the most. So I guess there’s more young ingenues out there than there are men trying to be actors. But we had over — I think it was about 1200, 1400 maybe — for the main lead role, but it was literally 2000 people submitted.

So again, Breakdown Express really handles a lot of the logistics of going through this. So you put up a casting notice, they submit to it, and then their headshots pop up on this interface and you start just going through the headshots. And then the next step is you upload some sides to Breakdown Express and you invite some of the people to do a taped audition. So they record themselves in their apartment and they upload the taped audition, which is your sides from your film. So they’re performing your script and they upload that to Breakdown Express. And so then you have a whole page of all of those. You go through those and rate those. And then you bring in those people to an actual in-person audition, and then you make your choice. Obviously with 2000 for the role of Linda, we can’t go through and watch all the tapes and all this, but you do go through. And sometimes they have little videos where they just say their name and introduce themselves. I can just click and you see them sort of, “Hey, my name is Joe Blow and I’m an actor.” And just seeing that sort of gives you a sense of their personality or whatever. So sometimes you’ll watch those.

So, you know, you’ve got to get in business with people that are not going to give you a hard time. You know, that’s a big part of it. They’ve got to be excited by having a film there. And if they’re just looking for the money or they’re just, you know, it just, that’s not what this is. This is a micro budget film. There’s not, nobody’s going to make a lot of money off this thing, but it’s a cool thing. And I, with the garage bar and with Eileen’s Boutique, you know, I said, hey, we can shoot your logo. We can shoot your store and sort of advertise it. This can be a great promotional piece for you. And both of them were into that as well.

So you’ll see in the finished film, the garage bar, he’s got all kinds of signage. I mean, the bar looks cool. And as I said, Dave, he just has sort of an artistic bent. He’s got sort of a good eye for, frankly, production design.

So he really has turned this neighborhood bar into just, it’s just a really cool set. So we didn’t have to do a lot of production design or anything like that. But again, it just, it worked for the film and he was excited to have us.

And that’s the other thing I would say when I was on Peerspace and Giggster, I would go and look like Eileen’s Boutique, as I said, was up in Oak Park. But when I, as a, you know, a middle-aged dude who buys all my clothes at Target and Costco, I didn’t even know that these little boutique stores existed. And come to find out, they’re all over. But I found one of these in Burbank, which is about, you know, 50 minutes from my house, Burbank, California. And I found one on Peerspace and I went and looked at it and didn’t really work. It wasn’t quite, I could make it work. It was a cool little boutique. But then I started got to think, man, there’s got to be some of these closer to my house.

But the people in LA also looked at some theaters. That was the other big rental location was theaters. And the theaters were extremely difficult to deal with, which is bizarre. Because you would think a bunch of starving actors doing theater in LA would love to have an indie film come and shoot at their theater. But that’s just not the case. They’re just very, very, and same thing with this store in Burbank. As you talk to the people that are sort of more in Hollywood, more in downtown LA, they’re just much more jaded. They’ve done a lot more productions. They’re not, you know, sort of in awe of the mystique of having a film there. So they just want to charge you money and they charge you extra. And they got all these rules and you can’t do this. If you want to do this, you get paid extra. You got to pay extra. If you want to shoot in this bathroom, you got to pay. You go up these stairs, you got to pay extra. So it was just a very, it just wasn’t a great experience.

And again, this is micro budget. We need people that are going to be able to, you know, kind of roll with some punches. Things are not always going to go exactly as planned. And we don’t have any money, you know, just like make it up. So I just needed people that could sort of roll with those. And I found the further I got from LA and Hollywood. So again, I live in Agoura Hills, which is a very, very far suburb of Los Angeles. In fact, I’m at the edge of LA County line and we’re almost in Ventura. And as I said, this bar, the Garage Bar is actually in Ventura. Eileen’s Boutique is in Oak Park, which is 10 minutes from my house. But I think that’s actually in Ventura County, not LA County.

So that’s another thing is, you know, if you don’t live in LA, it’s going to be harder to find actors, but locations should be much, much easier. You should be able to find some really cool locations and people that are excited to have you shooting there. So that’s, I’d say the biggest piece of advice is look around at what locations you can get that have cool production value, that look cool, and try and, you know, think about how you can incorporate those into your script.

But the locations definitely can be a challenge because there’s a lot, you know, without a lot of money. If you have money, then it’s always, it’s never quite that big of a challenge. But when you don’t have a lot of money, it is a challenge.

And some of it just, you know, it’s going to come down to sort of your ability to just talk and charm the people that own these locations and get them to agree to let you shoot there for very little bit of money.

So one thing that you definitely want to think through if you’re doing a micro-budget film is insurance. And there’s two types of insurance. There’s the liability insurance, which is going to cover, you know, if things break, people, you know, the locations, if something happens to them, your liability, your equipment, all that sort of stuff. And then the other piece of insurance is workers’ comp insurance. In case one of your crew or your actors gets hurt, then obviously they need to be piped into that disability insurance, which is through the workers’ comp if someone gets hurt.

So those two types of insurance, you definitely need, I think. And I want to be clear here too, this is an overview. I’m just sort of giving people an overview, have the insurance. I’m not an insurance broker. I’m not in the insurance business. I’m certainly not giving you advice on how to insure your movie. I’m just kind of telling you what I did and hopefully it will be a guide for you to go and do your own research and to figure out what is appropriate for you.

Obviously different states are different, different locations are different, but I’ll just give you a quick overview of sort of how the insurance went down for us. So the first thing is the liability insurance. I think it was a little less than $700. I have an insurance broker that I’ve used over the years for a variety of things. Like me and my wife have a life insurance policy through this guy. So it’s just, you know, I’ve used this insurance broker. I had some insurance when I did the film festival. I got some insurance through him. So I’ve used him before, happy to recommend him. He’s a nice guy.

So if you need this kind of insurance, you’re welcome to email me and I’ll give you his information, info@sellingyourscreenplay.com. But when you, for something like this, low budget insurance like this, you get what’s called an event insurance and it’s pretty standard. It’s, again, don’t quote me on the actual numbers, but roughly it’s like a million dollars of coverage per incident, $2 million of total coverage. And that’s just kind of standard.

And when you go to rental location, the locations that have done this before, they obviously want to make sure that you have insurance and that they’re protected. If you burn their building down, you know, you’ve got some insurance. Not sure $2 million of total coverage would cover most of these buildings in LA, but that’s another story.

But the bottom line is $1 million, $2 million, that’s very standard. That’s what people are expecting if you’re renting a location. And what you do is you get what’s called a certificate of insurance and you put them on as an additionally insured and that’s super simple. All you do is you just email your insurance broker and say, hey, the Garage Bar, here’s their address, I need them as an additionally insured. And he’ll produce what’s called this COI, certificate of insurance, and then you show that to the location person and they can verify that you do have the insurance. And it says this one million per incident, two million for total coverage.

Again, this was a little less than $700, but you definitely want to think that through. We did not have a lot of expensive equipment. I would say all total, I mean, I bought the camera for $1,000 on Craigslist. So I would say all total, our equipment was well less than $10,000. I know the sound guy had some high-end equipment, so I guess that would be covered. But I mean, as I said, we didn’t have, you know, tens of thousands of dollars. I would say if we had $10,000 worth of equipment, that’s probably high. I bet you could replace all of our equipment for less than that.

So those are the things you fill out. You’re going to fill out some paperwork when you’re doing this. And that’s how they’re going to arrive at this price that I got of $700. So this is also a rom-com. So there’s not anything dangerous. There’s no stunts. Even simple wrestling or punching or shooting, you know, a gun with blanks, those all add to the danger. You know, this is event insurance.

So I was very clear to them, yes, we’re shooting at a bar, but we’re not serving alcohol. Hopefully you’re not serving alcohol on your film set either. But anything like that that could add potential liability to the insurance company and add to their exposure obviously is going to cost you more.

So again, I sent them the script and they could evaluate the whole thing. But obviously this is a rom-com. So it’s mostly just two people sitting around talking. So there was nothing dangerous about it.

So I’m sure my price was about as low as you’re going to get. I mean, there was nothing dangerous about this film. We didn’t have a lot of equipment. So I can’t imagine it being any cheaper than that. Maybe different states would be a little bit cheaper. But in any event, your results may vary, but it’s going to depend on sort of what you’re doing in your film. That’s how it’s going to set the price.

So on the workers’ comp, again, this is what I’ve done numerous times when I’ve got insurance for films and stuff. At least here in California, it’s called State Fund. And I think it’s literally like statefund.gov. But if you just Google State Fund California, their website will come up. And I mean, for a government website, it is incredibly efficient and easy to use.

In about 10 minutes, you put in some information. You have to find either, they have a code, what kind of business is this? And you have to find your, it’s a film production. So you have to go through some little steps.

They have like a little assistant that pops up on the website. And there seems to be like an actual person on the other end that can answer questions. But the bottom line is you just go through this online application process. It takes about 10 minutes. You put in your, they give you a quote right there. You put in your credit card and then you’re covered.

And I think that was about $750. And I think mostly that’s based on payroll because you tell them how much payroll you’re going to have on your shoot. And obviously we’re paying everyone pretty much minimum wage. So we didn’t, our payroll was fairly small.

So again, I’m sure that’s going to affect how many people you have and how big a production. If you’ve got a much bigger production, obviously you tell them how many people you have, you tell them how much payroll and that’s going to affect the price.

So as I said, ours is about $750. Your results may vary, but it’s a pretty easy form to go through.

I can’t imagine most, I would think most states, I don’t know, as I said, this California one is really pretty well done. It works very, very well. So hopefully your state, if you’re in California, definitely check it out. But hopefully your state has something equivalent.

But anyways, that’s the insurance. Again, I know this is micro budget. I know insurance is something people might like to cut corners, but I would urge you to really think it through. In California, it’s illegal to run something, run a business without workers’ comp. You’re paying people even minimum wage. You got to have workers’ comp. I mean, I have not had any injuries. I’ve done three of these micro budget films now. I’ve not had any injuries or any problems. So I think I can say I run a tight ship. We try and do things right and be careful.

But unfortunately, things can happen. People can get hurt. So I would be very careful if you’re thinking about not having the workers’ comp. As I said, in California, it’s straight up illegal, probably illegal in your state as well. So again, this is another thing you really want to talk to someone that’s in the insurance business or a lawyer and really understand what you’re doing.

But as I said, I don’t think spending $1,500 of a $35,000 budget is really that bad in terms of getting the insurance. So at least for us, it just seemed like it was very, very much worth it.

OK, so you have your script, you’ve raised your money, you’ve got your locations, you’ve got your insurance. So the next piece of the puzzle was getting a crew. And this is a micro budget film. So obviously it’s a skeleton crew. We need the bare minimum number of people. And that’s pretty much what we had.

So we had a sound guy. We had a cinematographer and we had sort of a general use production assistant, you know, PA type of a guy that just did everything. But he was very much centered around helping the cinematographer move equipment, set up lights and move cords and that, breaking stuff down, building stuff back up every day. So he was very much sort of an onset PA that was helping with the actual production work.

And that was pretty much it for our regular crew. This is a rom-com. So we did have some kissing and that sort of stuff. It’s a romance.

So these, I’m in a red hot love affair, so they are kissing and cuddling. And so we had an intimacy coordinator for a couple of days, a lady named Barbara. So those three positions.

So the cinematographer is a friend of mine, Bernie, who I met through The Pinch. I mentioned that a moment ago. He’s someone I met through sellingyourscreenplay.com. He did a great job on The Pinch. He’s just a nice guy. We work well together. So it was an easy choice choosing him and trying to bring him on. Luckily he wasn’t doing anything.

And the reality is too, he likes doing indie film. People don’t, and this is sort of the thing that I’ll say for all of the people that came onto the crew, is people want to do indie films. Nobody gets into this business to do YouTube videos or documentaries or just commercials. That sort of stuff pays the bills. A lot of people in the film business end up doing editors and studios. They’re doing stuff on infomercials, commercials, YouTube videos and that sort of stuff.

And that’s great and you can make a living. And there’s certainly some fun to all of that, being on set. It’s interesting that every day is different. So there’s a lot of things that can be said for that. But most people get into film to do indie film. They want to do something artistic with some sort of grit.

So that’s sort of what I tried to offer to my crew.

So anyways, I got Bernie, as I said, I met him, he’s my cinematographer through Selling Your Screenplay. Jimmy was our sound guy. Literally he calls himself “Sound Guy Jimmy” is how he’s branded himself. He is a real sound professional. Like you look him up in IMDb, he’s got dozens of credits.

I found him on Craigslist, just put up an ad and he wasn’t doing anything. So again, once he submitted his resume, oh gee, this guy’s got a lot of experience. He seems cool. And we got on a phone, me and Bernie got on a phone call with him. Bernie has also done sound. So Bernie’s very technical with all this equipment and knows the sound equipment.

And that was one of the things, we needed a sound guy that had his own equipment. This thing’s micro budget. So you kind of got to come with your own sound package, which, you know, Jimmy definitely had.

But me and Bernie got on a Zoom call. I think it might’ve just been a phone call and we chatted with him and seemed like a nice guy. Seemed like he would be a cool guy to work with. Me and Bernie both liked him. So we hired him.

Tim was our sort of general use PA, as I said. He did all kinds of stuff on production, helping move equipment, helping Bernie set up lights. And Tim is from Wisconsin. He had just gotten to Los Angeles. And again, someone on Craigslist, I put an ad up. I got on a phone call with him, seemed like a smart guy, but you know, truthfully I could tell he seemed like a smart guy, a nice guy, just from his original email and resume and stuff.

So he was the only person that I talked to in interviews. Same thing with Sound Guy Jimmy, to be honest with you. Once I, you know, I’m vetting, you get a lot of resumes because this is micro budget, but we are still paying something to these people. So once you put an ad on Craigslist where you actually are paying a daily rate, you will get inundated with good people. It’s just a matter of vetting them.

And both Tim and Jimmy sent in, you know, good resumes and good cover letters. And so they were great choices. I would work with all of these people again.

Barbara, our intimacy coordinator, she is a script supervisor by trade, but she has done some intimacy coordinating as well. So again, through Craigslist, I got on a phone call with her and we chatted and she really came on and she’s just a really nice lady. She really made herself a big part of the crew on the two or three days that she was there. So it was great to have her.

I can’t really recommend Craigslist enough. I think in a lot of ways it gets sort of a bad rap because there’s definitely scams there and you definitely have sort of some, a lot of low-end people on there, but there’s also a lot of high-end people that are just looking for work. And so I recommend Craigslist as a resource, at least here in Los Angeles.

As I said, if you can pay even a minimum wage for film production, you will get absolutely inundated with people. So it’s definitely a resource to kind of think about.

If you know people and you’ve worked with them in the past, that’s another great thing. And I’ll talk a little bit more about this with actors, but if you’ve been in the business for a while and you can look at, you can go on IMDb, you can tell, you know, they’ve worked on projects with people that you’ve worked on projects with, so you can potentially vet them that way just by maybe you have some mutual people that you both have worked with and you can contact them.

So you definitely need to vet the people on Craigslist. You really need to make sure you’re getting good people because there’s definitely no, I mean, there’s no bar on Craigslist. Anybody can start sending you their resume. So you got to be careful, but I recommend it as a resource for finding a really good and competent crew.

So with casting, I would say the single biggest thing, and this is, I did three of these short form videos on casting and I just thought it was nice to kind of go through and really thank some and just showcase some of the actors that I’ve worked with on other projects and stuff.

So I did use a lot of actors from previous projects, people that I know, brought on, you know, from just other projects and actors that I’ve met over the years, friends that are actors, that sort of stuff. So that was definitely some of it.

But, you know, as a middle-aged dude, I don’t know a lot of, you know, hip young actors in their twenties now. And that’s who my leads were. The male and female lead are both in their twenties, you know, just recent college graduates.

So I did not have like a large reservoir of people to pull from in my own life. I just don’t know that many young actors anymore. So we had to go out and cast a lot of the roles. I would say more than half, three quarters of the roles, we had to go out and actually cast.

And we used a service called Breakdown Express. It’s literally breakdownexpress.com. They’ve been around for decades. They were here in the nineties when I moved to LA. Obviously it wasn’t all online back then, but they, from top to bottom, they have a great platform. It’s a little sort of antiquated, a little clunky, but they’ve really, they’ve been doing it for years and they’ve got this website.

And again, I’d used this for The Pinch and for The Rideshare Killer. The interface hasn’t changed. The Pinch was over 10 years ago. The interface is exactly the same. But I’m saying that it is a little clunky and a little old, but by the same token, once you figure out how to use it, it’s extremely useful. And they’ve really done it for so long. They know what tools you need.

So you can run your entire casting process through this Breakdown Express. So it’s a great resource if you’re in LA.

I’m sure they have it in New York, probably other cities too, but for sure in LA. And just as an example, so we put up the notice we need, you know, an early twenties woman, early twenties guy. I think we had over 2,000 submissions for the role of Linda Flynn, the female lead. And I think that was the most. So I guess there’s more young ingénues out there than there are men trying to be actors, but we had over two, I think it was about 1,200, 1,400 maybe for the main lead role, but it was literally 2,000 people submitted.

So again, this Breakdown Express really, they handle a lot of the sort of the logistics of going through this. So you put up a casting notice, they submit to it, and then their headshots pop up in this interface and you start just going through the headshots.

And then the next step is you upload some sides to Breakdown Express and you invite some of the people to do a taped audition. So they record themselves in their apartment and they upload the taped audition, which is your sides from your film. So they’re performing your script and they upload that to Breakdown Express.

And so then you have a whole, you know, a whole page of all of those. You go through those and rate those. And then you bring in those people to an actual in-person audition, and then you make your choice.

Obviously with 2,000 for the role of Linda, we can’t go through and watch all the tapes and all this, but you do go through. And sometimes they have little videos where they just say their name and introduce themselves. I can just click and you just see them sort of, “Hey, my name is Joe Blow and I’m an actor.” And just seeing that sort of gives you a sense of sort of their personality or whatever. So sometimes you’ll watch those.

Sometimes I would look at the actual tapes, you know, they’ll have some reels. “This is my drama reel, my comedy reel.” Sometimes you’ll like, but with 2,000, me and Tony, we’re just going through and basically just anybody who seems to have the right look, we’ll look at their resume a little bit and we’ll throw them into this bucket.

So from the 2,000, we went down to about 200. So 10%, we thought, okay, these women look like what we have in mind for the Linda role. And then of those 200, I would say less than 50%. So let’s just say about 100 actually submitted the tape audition.

So you lose a lot of people. So keep that in mind as you go through these steps. You know, there’s not a high bar. Like you put up this casting notice, all they got to do is just check a button. Yes, submit, submit, submit. So you’re getting all these submissions. A lot of the people don’t really want to do it. I was very, you know, they don’t really want to do a micro budget film. And I think, and you know, once they sort of find out what it is, they sort of drop off.

But I was super clear in all stages of this in my original casting notice. I let people know, this is micro budget. This isn’t going to be glamorous. You know, it’s not going to be fancy food and fancy trailers and, you know, this, this is a gritty micro budget film. We’re going to get in there and do the work. Not going to be the, you know, the sexiest experience you’ve probably ever had in the film industry. Be a little bit down and dirty and just getting things done. Long hours, long days. So I was clear upfront with all of that.

So nobody had a problem by the time they got into the in-person audition. Everybody was just excited to be there.

But anyways, that’s how that all works. Breakdown Express really handles all this stuff. They even handled the in-person auditions. Like you, once you have these taped auditions, you can flag that person. You can put them in a bucket and then you can send them the information with the taped audition. You can keep notes.

And then you have, you can print out this whole thing. You know, like the, you give them a time slot. It emails them their time slot. So again, this Breakdown Express is just a really great service and they’ve really just polished their interface and made it very, very useful.

And again, I’m not associated with Breakdown Express. I don’t know anyone over there that works there. So this isn’t me plugging them in any way. I just think they are really a great service. And they even like, you can pick up the phone and call them and someone that’s very knowledgeable will pick up. They have a little chat box. You can type into that. And it’s clearly someone who knows the interface because as I said, the interface is a little clunky and it’s not always that intuitive. So sometimes you do need a little help, but it’s just a fantastic service. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

And the people there are, I think they must all be actors because they’re just, you’re very outgoing and really know, they understand what’s going on. This isn’t like some customer service rep in India answering the phone when you call them.

This is like someone that really understands the business and understands what you’re trying to do. So I can’t recommend them enough.

I don’t know what their coverage is outside of LA. So check it out and see if you can find actors. I would imagine New York, maybe Atlanta, Austin, maybe there’s a few cities that they’re in, but I’m not really sure.

But there are other services. I mentioned Craigslist for crew. I would say definitely you could probably find actors there. But I think if you’re not in New York or LA, I would say it goes back to that same thing. You need to be getting out there and networking with your local community, local film festivals, local film schools, just get in local Facebook film groups. You can probably meet these people and start to sort of just build a tribe of people that you know, and you’ll meet filmmakers, actors, all of the above. And that’s how I think I would go about it if I wasn’t living in LA.

But for casting something like this, Breakdown Express is definitely the way to go.

If you’re doing, and just in terms of cost, it’s very inexpensive. I think if you’re doing a SAG project, don’t quote me on this, but I’ll just give you sort of a rough overview. I think if it’s a SAG project, I think you can post the notice for free. There’s literally no cost to the producer at all.

I think ours was non-union. So I think we had to pay $125 or $130 or something for the casting notice. So some things where there’s different levels. And I think if you just go to Actors Access, which is just actors. If you want to go to the agents and managers as well, it has to be a SAG project or you have to pay this price.

I mean, there are some intricacies to it like that, but I mean, you know, $130 to cast the movie. We got tons of submissions. You know, it definitely was worth whatever little bit of money we paid.

So again, breakdownexpress.com if you’re in LA and looking to cast a project.

So the casting obviously is one step, but I want to take a little time here and call out the extras for the film because these are people that are not getting a lot of glory, but they’re showing up and they’re doing some work.

You know, Kurt, who edits this podcast. Hey, Kurt, how’s it going? He was nice enough to show up and be an extra at the bar one day. So, you know, getting extras and I’ll get into a bigger part, but that was two days where we had a bunch of extras. And I’ll talk about that in a second, but getting extras for a micro budget feature film, it, for the most part, it’s what you think it would be, which is getting your friends and family to come out and just wander around in the background and be in the background as people.

So there is a piece to that. And thank you, Kurt. And thank you to my other friends that just showed up. You know, my family came out. They are in a quick scene and just Tony, the other producer, in the restaurant scene, him and his wife came out there as extras. And then he brought two of his friends. They’re in the background, you’ll see them in the restaurant scene.

So again, a lot of getting extras for a micro budget film is just begging your friends to show up.

We had two scenes where we needed quite a few extras and one of the scenes at the bar is our climactic scene and it sort of, it requires the extras to interact, you know, to say some stuff. And they’re basically there to watch the protagonist try and get back with his girlfriend and he’s live streaming it. So they’re sort of reacting to what’s going on and oohing and ahhing and cheering and sort of, you know, cheering him on.

So I needed some, some, it was more than just people in the background walking by.

So I’m going to just take a step back here. I’ve mentioned Peerspace and Giggster before and those are services where you can go on and you can rent properties for a film shoot.

So this was last summer, you know, about a year ago, maybe even a little longer than that, 14 months ago, as I was starting to get into production, pre-production with my film and I was looking on Giggster and Peerspace, I thought, you know, it’d be interesting to list a house on there and just see it from the other side of things and sort of understand how it works as a renter.

My mom has a house out here. She’s moving out here. It’s a long story. And so I had this empty house that I could rent out. Obviously my mom didn’t really care that much about it. Didn’t mind, I’d care. She just didn’t mind. She was busy packing up her house in North Carolina.

So she was okay with it and I thought it’d be an interesting experiment. So I did that. I put it up on Giggster and I actually found some productions. And mostly what it was, was student films. I had a bunch, I had three or four just, you know, local film school type things where they’re coming through doing their thesis film or whatever. You know, the film students are all, you know, earnest, hardworking, excited people. So that was really no problem.

But I did have like a real production, like a low budget, not micro budget, more like sort of a low budget B-movie type folks come in here and they sort of scared me off it. I could just tell they were going to really beat up the house and they were really not easy to work with. So I sort of backed off.

But one of the people that came through this is an actress named Gina Nemo and she runs an acting school in Ventura. And again, if you’re listening, you know, our Garage Bar was up in Ventura and she runs an acting school in Ventura.

And she was looking for a house to shoot with her acting students one day and found me on Giggster and came here. She rented the house for a Sunday and, you know, she showed up and she basically just had one person running a camera, but it was really just a bunch of actors and they were shooting some little YouTube type stuff, just short form little skits and bits.

She had herself as the director. She’s also an actor, so she acted and directed. And then she had an actor running the camera, but it was just an iPhone on a gimbal. And then she had one PA, more like a line producer type, who was sort of running the set and keeping things going. So basically just three crew people.

There’s just a big difference when you’re renting your house to a situation like that, as opposed to a big crew of 15 people with heavy lights and cameras and tripods and sandbags and apple boxes, just banging around the equipment. They were hard on the house. So after she rented—she was super nice and it was super easy—I decided I wasn’t going to rent the house again. It just wasn’t right. But she was so nice that I emailed her and told her she’s welcome to come back and rent the house.

When they were doing this, I actually looked her up on IMDb. I thought, I wonder who she is. So I looked her up on IMDb and, lo and behold, she’s obviously an actress, but she had worked with a lot of filmmakers that I’ve worked with fairly recently. In fact, Tuesday Knight, who was in my film The Rideshare Killer, had just done a film, a short film, with her. And then she also did a film with a director, Bob Cabelas, who directed a film that I did called Dish Dogs back in the ’90s. I had not stayed in touch with him, and this film she did with him was just a few years ago. So I was like, oh wow, what a coincidence.

So I emailed her about that stuff and we got to know each other a little bit, just started emailing back and forth. So again, got to know each other just through email, but I had met her that one time. So then at some point I was thinking, you know, I wonder if I could get any of her acting students to show up and be extras. I’ll give them a credit.

So I emailed her and she said, “Oh yeah, sure, I’m sure I could find some acting students for you.” And that’s how I found these extras, just sort of getting myself out there, meeting people, and networking a little bit.

The deal I had with these extras was basically that I’d give them a real credit. It’s not going to be like “bar attendant number seven.” I would give them an actual name. Some of them ended up getting lines in the film. There’s a couple of one-liners. And as I said, some of them actually really participated there, oohing and aahing and this sort of stuff. I mean, these are real actors—they’re going to acting class and a lot of them have resumes with multiple gigs and stuff. So it was a fantastic get for the production, just having real actors to be able to perform like this.

So I would say definitely, that’s sort of the lesson learned: sometimes just getting yourself out there can lead to some really good things.

That’s sort of what I would consider—just anything you can do to get yourself out there and meet people in the business can potentially lead to some good outcomes, as it did in this case as well. Getting all of these extras really helped the film and made it much better. It’s a climactic scene—if I had to just get my friends and family to come out to it, I don’t know, maybe I would have been able to do it, but it definitely made the film a lot better having these folks.

They were all super cool. They showed up excited to be doing it. I’ve stayed in touch with some of them. They came back to shoot at my mom’s house a month or two later, so I started getting to know them and seeing them again. It was just a really great opportunity, sort of a coincidence, but it really worked out. So as I said, if you can get out there and meet people, good things can potentially happen.

OK, so we’re moving along here with our pre-production. We’ve got our cast, our crew, our insurance, our locations. So the next big piece is the equipment. You know, what are we going to shoot this on? Where are we going to get our equipment from?

So the first, I’d say the most important thing—and I’m not overly technical with this stuff. I, as someone who spent most of my career in the film business as a writer, I mean, I’ve been on set some, but I don’t know a lot about cameras and lighting and that sort of stuff. So most of this really was just me relying on Bernie. I trust Bernie, you know, to make these decisions and to give good advice. And I think everything worked out well. I think he made an excellent choice with this camera. And I love the way it looks, and it really was a great camera for what we were doing.

So we used a Panasonic S1 Lumix. I literally bought this camera for a thousand dollars off Craigslist. It has one little problem with the little screen that folds out. There’s like a missing piece of plastic there. It doesn’t affect the actual camera at all. But it’s good in low light. So that was one of the criteria that Bernie was concerned about. We’re shooting in a bar, and just micro budget, we don’t have tons of lights. So it’s not like we’re going to be able to take this bar with no windows and just light it up exactly how we want. So we knew we needed a camera that was good in low light, and we wanted something small so we could move quickly. We could get into corners and get into places that we couldn’t necessarily get in with a big camera. We didn’t have a big crew. Again, it’s micro budget. So Bernie owns a high-end camera. He has some high-end lenses, and we talked about shooting it on that. But it just it becomes a bigger production with a bigger camera. It takes you two or three people to run the camera. You certainly would need one person running focus and one person running the camera, probably another person, you know, pulling the camera forward and back. So it just it just becomes a much more difficult, bigger process.

So that’s what we decided to do was go with this Panasonic S1 Lumix. And as I said, I love the way it looks, and the camera performed great. And as I said, in terms of a thirty-five thousand dollar budget, a thousand dollars for the camera is obviously a great price.

Once we had the camera, you still need to buy a lot of accessories to go with it, including lenses. Lenses are not inexpensive. So we ended up buying two lenses, a 35 millimeter and an 18 to 50 zoom lens. So that sort of gave us sort of, you know, we could get—we could get some close-ups and pullbacks and stuff with the zoom. And then the 35 millimeter was what we used most of the time just shooting the movie. They were about five hundred dollars each. So these are not high-end lenses. You know, really good lenses are thousands and thousands of dollars. So these were just used lenses I got on one of the used photography store sites. I think it’s called B&H or I can’t remember off the top of my head, but it’s one of the photography sites that I’ve seen and used before. They have used equipment. And we just bought these two lenses. They ship them to you.

You still have to buy a lot of SD cards, chargers, a hard case. I bought a hard case, that was probably a hundred dollars. Batteries—you want extra batteries. I mean, the camera for a thousand dollars, it came, I don’t think it had any SD cards. It did have a battery and a charger, but we bought more batteries, another charger. You know, you want to be able to charge the battery. It also has a plug, but you really want the batteries because you need to move quickly. You don’t want to keep having to plug the camera in. And SD cards—you know, they’re just these little SD cards that go in this camera. It has two slots so you can record on two cards. Definitely do that because we did have problems with these SD cards. They’re not super expensive. I think it might be like a hundred or one hundred fifty dollars for a 256 gig card. And I think we ended up having about eight of them. And we did have to—like one of them completely went out. And one of them went out for a couple of days. We were able to kind of get it back going, but I was afraid to ever use that card again. So again, the camera has two slots. You can make a backup right on the fly. Definitely do that. And then, you know, back those SD cards up. And you’re going to need to buy them. I mean, even at one hundred fifty dollars for one, you’re still buying eight of them. So that’s still like eight hundred dollars.Top of Form

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Maybe some of them were a little cheaper because I don’t think I spent quite that much. But the bottom line is, you know, you’re talking about three grand when you add all of it up: a thousand dollars for the camera, a thousand dollars for the two lenses, and then it’s going to be about a thousand dollars for your SD cards, chargers, the hard case, all of that stuff. But again, for shooting a micro-budget film, that’s a pretty complete camera package that you have there for about three thousand dollars. And so that’s the camera package.

And then for the lighting, Bernie brought one of his own LED lights here. These LED lights these days, they can light up a room. So he had one really powerful LED light that you could put in this big softbox. So the light is pretty small, and you screw it into this big sort of like oval-shaped, half-circle dome-like thing that folds and breaks down, and then you’ve got to build it back up. But that can just light up a big section. And when it’s built out, that box is probably four feet across in diameter, so it’s a big light.

And then I bought another one of those for two hundred dollars off Craigslist. It’s a little smaller, probably about half the size, but also pretty bright. So those were our main lights—these big LED lights.

Then we bought, just off Amazon, these GVM RGB lights. You can change the colors on them. Those were useful. They’re about maybe 12 inches by 12 inches. They’re not super bright—you’re not going to light up a whole room—but they’re definitely good for fill lights and getting close-ups.

The other big thing with these RGB lights is you can turn them to any color. So we were able to use them like: put a little pink back here, a little blue back there, a little green back there. So you can do a lot with the color. I think they were about three hundred or three hundred fifty dollars for a set of three of them, just off Amazon.

So basically we had those five lights: two big LED lights and then three small RGB lights.

In terms of sandbags, Apple boxes, C-stands, grip tape—all of this stuff—I got most of it from Amazon. I had milk crates I think I got from Home Depot, but just about everything else I got on Amazon.

You can buy sandbags empty on Amazon, and then you just go down to Home Depot and buy a bag of sand and fill them up yourself. It’s pretty inexpensive.

So I had 10 or 12 sandbags. We bought two C-stands—I think it was 90 dollars each, or 90 dollars for one, I can’t remember—but we had two C-stands to hold the lights.

And then we had these reflectors—you know, it’s like a big board, and you can turn it from white or black. It’s a big thing you put on a C-stand. You can use it as a reflector and change it to silver, or you can turn it to black or white to dim light or block it. So we had a couple of those.

Again, milk crates from Home Depot were maybe 10 or 15 dollars each. We had a bunch of those. Grip tape, and a bunch of other expendables you’ll need.

We also had one day where we needed to make it look like it was nighttime. It was actually daytime here at my mom’s house. So we just bought a big roll of black plastic from Home Depot and taped it over the outside of the windows to make everything darker. That might have been around 800 dollars for all of that stuff.

Don’t quote me on that, but roughly.

But most of it, as I said, I just got on Amazon, so you can just go on Amazon and figure out what you need. I’m probably forgetting a couple other items here, but I would say the $3,000 for the camera package and $1,000 for everything else—you’re basically talking about, out of your $35,000 budget, about $4,000 going into the equipment you need in terms of production.

As I said, Jimmy, the sound guy—sound guy Jimmy—he came with his own sound equipment, so I’m not speaking to that. He’s a professional sound guy and had a whole cart of equipment. The sound turned out great.

So I can’t speak to that, but I would say if you need sound equipment, try and hire a sound guy who can bring his own sound equipment. But for about $4,000, you can get a decent camera and grip package to shoot a micro-budget film.

The other piece is, we’ll see how it turns out for us, but owning the camera is also just a good thing for a micro-budget film because there are inevitably going to be little reshoots or pickup shots that we want once the edit gets more complete.

If you have the camera, I might just need a little wide shot of someone walking, or a hand opening a door, or some feet walking, or an exterior shot of the building. I can just go and get those at no cost. I can just take the camera and shoot it.

If you have to hire a cinematographer and rent a camera, with a micro-budget film, you’re just not going to have the money.

You’re not going to be able to go out and do some of those reshoots. So there’s that piece. The other piece is, is, you know, this package, obviously I’ve, let’s say I paid $4,000 for this camera and grip package. I don’t know that I can sell it for $4,000, but I bet I can sell it for 2,500 or $3,000. So I could get some of that money back and certainly with a micro budget film, that might be a consideration.

You might want to actually get some of that and bring your budget down. I think I’m probably, I, this experience has been so great, frankly. I think I’m going to just shoot another film once I get this one done. We’ll sort of see where I’m at with that, but I’m definitely hanging on to the camera for at least a little while in case we do need to do reshoots. And I would encourage you, if you are a micro budget film and you do that, just think that through, hold onto the camera as long as you can, because there might be some situations where you want to go back and shoot stuff. But if you need to sell the equipment to make your budget for a micro budget film, that’s totally understandable. And I think that could be a real strategy as well.

Okay, so the next piece is the food. This is a big, you know, consideration. I think we spent, I don’t know if it was quite 3000. I budgeted about $3,000 for the food. You know, again, it’s micro budget. So that’s a big chunk of the budget, but you don’t want to skimp too much on this. You know, you’re not paying people a lot and you do want to keep your crew somewhat happy. So, I mean, the food was basically, it’s exactly what you would think it was. One of the things that, one of the reasons I rented my mom’s house on Gixxer or Pierce Place was just to get me on set and see what other people’s sets looked like. And so one of the things I looked at when these productions were coming through my mom’s house and I was looking at them, what do they got on the craft services? And in this day and age, it’s pretty much what you would think. You just go down to Costco and buy a bunch of snacks, chips and nuts and water and soda and, you know, raisins and, you know, whatever that kind of stuff that people want, just for some snacks. I mean, we had peanut butter sandwich. Someone needed a sandwich or some white bread, some fruit, bananas, that sort of stuff. But that’s just a function of me just going to the store and buying it.

So I think I did one Costco run. Maybe I did two. I think I just did one big Costco run at the beginning. And then at some point, I’m sure I went to the grocery store. I know I had to buy some more soda and that sort of stuff. So that’s just sort of your craft services. But in terms of your meal, you do need to provide, if you’re going to shoot more than six hours, it’s sort of standard in the industry. You do need to provide a meal for people. So we had a couple of days that we didn’t shoot for six hours. We were done after about six hours. So I think that was one or two days we didn’t have a meal, but it was a, I think it was a 15, 16 day shoot. So the other days we did, and we would spend about a hundred dollars is sort of what I budgeted.

We had the two days with the extras where we went a little, not a little, we went well above that because we had to feed all of those folks. But this process was just as, again, intuitive as you think it was. You just look at restaurants around your location. A lot of them have like family packs or catering menus, and you just find stuff that you think people would like. And the websites are all really sophisticated now. You can just choose what time, you know. So I would do it the day before. I would order the food. I would have a pickup time the next day. And someone from the production would go down and pick up the food at the designated time. We never had any problems. It was pretty much always ready. You know, El Pollo Loco is a good one. There’s a bunch of local restaurants that we use that were good.

In terms of the two days with extras, one of them, we did Subway. And I think I spent about $200 and maybe $20 on a big Subway platter. And I mean, we had more sandwiches than, I think we had, let’s say, 15 to 18 people, $220 worth of Subway. People were taking subs home. So we had plenty of food that the next day I had fewer extras, but I spent a little more on Panda Express. And we just had gallons of Panda Express. So, you know, again, people seem to actually like the Panda Express more than Subway. So people took, you know, lots of it home. We had plenty on set. People could eat. So that’s what we did with the food.

And as I said, I think I budgeted about $3,000. I don’t think I quite hit that, but it was definitely, I averaged $100 a day for the meal. And as I said, two of the days were a little higher. So that’s, you know, 15, 1600. And then the Costco run soda stuff. So maybe 500, $600. So we were probably at about 2000, maybe a little more than $2,000 for the food all total. But it’s really just a pretty much a straightforward process. This is micro budget. So I’m the one that, you know, ended up doing all of this stuff. If you have, you know, someone, if you’re a bigger production, you’ll have a craft services person. You’ll have a caterer. You’ll certainly have like an associate producer that handles the logistics of all this. But a micro budget film, it’s not that hard in this day and age. As I said, everything’s online. You can just order food. And it’s just pretty much a straightforward process.

So I think in terms of production, that’s kind of the gist of how I put all of this together. I just want to run through some of the other things that you might be saying, well, what about production designer? What about this? What about that? I think most of those other jobs that I didn’t mention are jobs that I did. We didn’t have a makeup artist. I told the actors again, right from the get go, I told them they were doing their own hair and makeup. So we didn’t have a costume designer or a hair or makeup person. I worked with the actors. I personally went and worked with the actors. I would work with them and figure out what they’re going to wear, that sort of stuff.

Obviously, if you have a wardrobe person, it makes it a little bit easier, but micro budget, we didn’t have someone to pay. There was no first AD. I was sending out the call sheets the day before and doing all of that sort of stuff, keeping an eye on the set. Tony, my producing partner, he does some of the, I would say some of the first AD stuff. He definitely is keeping things a little bit organized. We’re on set shooting, and so he’s keeping things organized with the food coming and making sure the actors are ready. So some of those AD, second AD duties, fell on Tony. He was on set most of the time. So it was good to have him there for that.

Definitely a big help, but just in terms of basic AD stuff, I was doing the call sheets. I was sending that out every night. Didn’t have a production designer. I just got in there and did what production design we needed done. There are definitely some limitations that I have. I need to get better at that. The two main sets that I decorated were here at my mom’s house where I’m recording this podcast. And we made a bedroom look like an apartment bedroom, and we made the family room look like an apartment living room. So those are the two sets that I really production designed and I could have done better.

Let’s just put it like that. You really don’t want to have any white walls. You really want to just pack the walls with stuff. It just looks cooler on film. Most of it won’t be in focus, but it just looks a lot better. But the other locations, the store, the theater, and certainly the garage bar that we were at, the production design was done. I picked those locations because I didn’t have to do a lot of production design. So you got to think it through a little bit. As I mentioned, we were in a coffee shop. We had to make it look like a restaurant. So I knew there was going to be some production design there. That was probably actually, after these two apartment rooms that I designed, that was definitely took some production design. But it was things that I had like plates, glasses, silverware, napkins. You know, I think I bought some bread baskets, some sort of restaurant-looking bread baskets from Amazon, that sort of stuff.

But it was pretty straightforward. And as I said, not expensive because it was basically stuff that I did own. We did spend some money on props again. No prop master. So this was me doing this. You know, we got an apron for the waitress, some clipboard when she comes to apply for the job. She’s studying to be a lawyer. So I needed an LSAT prep school prep book, that kind of stuff, lemons, et cetera. And so there were some props. I don’t think we even spent a hundred dollars on all of those props, but there definitely were some props. And again, this is just me before, during pre-production I went through the script and, you know, just you highlight all the props that you’re going to need, you make lists, and you just make sure you have everything on the day it’s needed.

Again, this is micro budget. So we didn’t have someone, a prop master that we could pay to sort of handle all this stuff. So the other big thing that I did was the DIT, and that’s transferring your data from the SD card onto a hard drive and making backups. Obviously you want to make sure this is done at a high level and you have someone doing it that is very detail oriented. I’ve done this on all of my films. So I took care of this on this film, and again on a bigger production you’re going to have a dedicated DIT guy that really understands that and makes sure that it’s done right. I mean, this is your film. So if you lose some of your footage, then it’s very, very expensive. You’re going to have to go back and reshoot it.

So there’s probably a bunch of other little jobs here and there that I also did, but that’s sort of the gist of it, and sort of hopefully gives you sort of an idea about how this film came together. And hopefully I’ve, just by sort of sitting here and just describing each step, I’ve demystified the process a little bit, and I really hope people listen to this and think it’s not that hard. But it’s not rocket science. It’s not brain surgery.

You know, if you’re determined and have a little persistence and are willing to work hard, you can go out there and you can make your own feature film, or your own micro budget feature film. As I said, definitely check out all the short form videos. We will put some links in the show notes to all of that. You can click over to that. I’ll be sending out emails too. So if you’re on my email list sellingyourscreenplay.com/guide you can sign up there. You’ll get the emails from us as well. If any questions, don’t hesitate to send in your questions, I’m happy to talk more about this process.

Obviously the post-production and all of that stuff, maybe I’ll do a follow-up video that covers that, but we’re sort of in the middle of that so I can’t really speak to how all that is going to turn out at this time. But maybe in the future I will. But if you have any questions, anything I didn’t explain fully or if you’re wondering about something, just hit me, send me an email info@sellingyourscreenplay.com. I’m happy to answer it. And as I said, maybe I’ll make a follow-up video once the film is finished and actually released to kind of complete this entire process. Anyways, that’s the show.

Thank you for watching.