[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Film Courage: What is a low budget movie?
Kim Adelman, Author/Filmmaker/Instructor: It’s so hard to define what a low budget movie is because sometimes you see something that was made and it’s $10 million and that is way low budget for Hollywood, but is that low budget? Like you and I could afford to make a $10 million feature film? I don’t think so. But it is considered low budget. Coda that won the Academy Award this year, is a low budget film. That was made for $10 million but that was obviously a financed film, it wasn’t out of her own pocket that she made that film. There are people who can make films out of their own pocket.
Many years ago, but is still a prime example, is Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi that he made for $7,000 that he earned the money by selling his body to science. It’s a very famous story, he’s written an entire book about it but he made an entire feature film shot on film for $7,000. I know a lot of people have made feature films for like $10,000- $11,000, $15,000 but that’s not shooting for a long time, that’s shooting for a very limited time in very limited locations and it’s not going to compete with a Hollywood film whatsoever. It’s going to feel very much like there isn’t a lot of money there and hopefully there’s some kind of story that just has to be told and the filmmaker couldn’t wait around to try to get real funding for it so they just made it themselves, like By hook or by crook this is getting made with whatever money I can raise, hopefully maybe by Kickstarter or something like that. But whatever money I can make for us, we’re going to make this film and that’s what I consider it’s not low budget at that point, it’s no budget. That’s always the term you use. It’s no budget film but there are levels there. SAG has different agreements for how much money, there’s a ultra low budget, low budget, micro budget, etcetera. There are official terms for…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BIO:
Kim Adelman is the author of Making It Big in Shorts. She produced 19 short films that won 30+ awards and played over 150 film festivals worldwide, including the Sundance Film Festival four years in a row. Ms. Adelman currently teaches Cinema Production 2 at Mount St. Mary’s University and Low Budget Filmmaking at UCLA Extension, where she was honored as Entertainment Studies Instructor of the Year in 2014 and won the Distinguished Instructor Award in 2016.
MAKING IT BIG IN SHORT: Shorter, Faster, Cheaper: The Ultimate Filmmaker’s Guide to Short Films
CONNECT WITH KIM ADELMAN
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