How to Make a Film Without a Budget

If you want to make a film, but you have little or no money, you are not alone. Many people want to and can make a film with or without a budget. You just need a few things that are a little more important than money.

The first thing you need is a vision. Get yourself some music. Go sit by a lake. Do anything that inspires you and gets your creative juices flowing. Once you have let your mind do leaps and twirls around all of the ideas that come to your mind, get a piece of paper and a pencil. Write one or all of the ideas down. You can do this in either one of two ways. You can storyboard your idea or you can write it in the form of a script.

Next, work on the details of your dream film. Name your characters, number your scenes, and figure out what the music score will sound like. After you have done this, you can match your film up with the perfect location. Since you are working without a budget, you will have to use either your car or your own two feet to look for jungles, alleys, sidewalks or maybe even the inside of someone's car to shoot your film.

In order to make sure your no or low budget film does not look cheap, you may want to make sure that all of the background noise is filterd out. Make sure you can control what is going on at all times, so that you don't have bystanders doing anything that will make it seem like you are shooting a no budget film.

Once you have your location, you can get your crew together. The crew should consist of your friends or relatives. All must be willing to stand around for how ever long they have to between takes and the rearranging of scenes. Therefore, everyone on your crew needs to have a good attention span. At lease two people need a good eye for detail, and one person needs to have had some sort of film or tv experience before.

After you have your film crew together, you can work without a budget by creating your own light. Film lighting can be very expensive. Therefore, it's a good idea to cut costs here. Make use of the natural sunlight for outdoor scenes and use umbrellas and other types of shades such as roof tops to diffuse light. You can shoot in the dark of night. However, remember to use some tests shots with a digital camera in order to make sure things aren't too dark and their are not too many shadowns present.

After you have your lighting set up, you can then begin to film. Hopefully, you have gotten some talented friends to be your actors or you have decided to place yourself in the film.

After you start rolling with your no budget film, call your own shots. Have fun yelling "roll it" and "cut" whenever you want to. That's an advantage of working without a budget, you don't have to answer to anyone else, not even the camera rental people because you didn't rent any cameras!

When the shooting is over and you need to start editing, use a movie maker program that came with your microsoft windows or ygo to a college and see if somehow, they will let you use their Final Cut Pro or Premiere program. After editing, you can find someway to get the transferred to a dvd. This "video duplication" can cost anyware from 29 to 50.00 dollars, and voila, your low budget film is complete.