How to Get Money For Your Film

but before we get started I just wanted to say we're continually reminded of how amazing the film riot community is and how much it just blows our mind the community that has been built around this show thanks to you guys and last week's episode was a big reminder of that for us because in the comments section of last week's episode you guys really showed up with some wonderfully kind and encouraging words and really appreciate that that stuff that's like fuel for us to keep going seeing that the things that we hope this show would turn into it actually is and that it's affecting you guys in the same way it's affecting us it's it's become this really great relationship where you guys have encouraged and built us up as much as we hopefully have done for you so again thank you for that but another thing we saw asked a whole lot in the comments section of last week's episode which of course that episode was all about clarifying different levels of budget is how we get our budgets for our film and make that money back first I wanted to start with how we make our money back from short film since I think that leads into how we get the money and the answer to the question of how we make our money back is 90% of the time we don't make money on short films I think some people have been able to but that is not the norm for sure there are definitely things that you can try to do to bring in some revenue to offset the cost of your film and depending on the cost to begin with maybe some extra money on top of that and those are things like submitting the footage from your film to be sold as stock footage or stock images stock music if you made all the music yourself any assets you made for the films like VFX assets anything custom that you can put up as a pack to sell to try to recoup that cost or there's also on-demand services that will put your film on places like Amazon and you can get some revenue from the streaming there although it's usually pretty miniscule you can also monetize your film which I would only do this through ads like you get on YouTube I would personally never put anything up for rent since I don't think almost anyone is gonna pay to watch a short film like 99% of the time and that's the whole point of making a short film in my opinion is to get your work out there and show what you're capable of but for me personally I don't even like to monetize our films on you tube it's a bit distracting I think and it doesn't really make that much money anyway for instance this episode of film riot that was monetized and hit 1 million views only made a little bit over $1,000 and that's with a million views now there have been episodes that hit that amount of money would just have those views because YouTube is confusing but it's not something that I would count on because it's so unpredictable some of the things that I have personally done to try to recoup some of that cost is you sell some posters or our on set experience packs that have a lot of special features on how we made our films these have helped to recoup a little bit but I've never really made my money back for me making all these short films like I said last week they're just passion projects one that my cast crew and I come together to make and invest in ourselves we do the work so we can gain more experience and create calling cards for what we can do as artists that will hopefully take us to the next stage of the thing we're really wanting to do because like I said on the show before no one's gonna invest in you if you aren't willing to first invest in yourself of course that doesn't necessarily have to mean money that can also just mean time often it does just mean time and effort you can't do great things with little to no resources but now let's move into how I get the money for my films and for that I want to take a look at a few different films starting out with one of my earliest public short films which is tell-tell cost me somewhere in the area of $2,000 and since my entire crew was just family and friends willing to spend their weekends helping me and the locations where my girlfriend's house and my parents house all the money went to cast travel expenses for the cast food props gear makeup and wardrobe and I got this budget in a very stupid way that I do not recommend you doing which was all by maxing out a credit card which then took me almost a year to pay off so again definitely isn't something I would recommend doing then of course there were a couple of those hundred dollar type films which I did pay for myself but after a while I wanted to take on bigger projects to build my experience and have larger crews and those budgets were not sizes that I could take on alone so that's where our partners came in and that was for films like Ghost house chainsaw and ballistic for those I went to people who believed in us who got what we were trying to do with film riot and importantly had gear and software that I would be using on the show and showing you guys that we did use with or without their help on the project and for me that's key if you're gonna try to go this route I think authenticity really is very important whenever I've gone to a company my pitch is always the same I'm going to be using your stuff either way but do you want to help us make this the best it can be and to the credit of many of these companies they decided to help and in fact some of them said no and I still use their gear and show it on the show and people said that we got paid to do it when we never did they said no now I totally understand that I'm in a unique and very lucky position that I very much appreciate with film riot and all of you that does give me the ability to bring in companies like that so the approach is definitely different and not really a realistic one if you don't have a following but you never know until you try one option for you could be going for a lower dollar amount and just one company that you really believe in what could make it worth it for them is content everyone is always looking for content either to show off what their gear software is capable of or just to draw eyes to what they're doing as a whole before I had much of a following at all that's actually exactly what I did and let us direct hooked us up with some gear that we wouldn't have had otherwise and we didn't have an audience at the time they just hooked us up so they could get content out of it now if you are gonna do that you of course need to have something that you can show them from your work which is we're investing in yourself first comes in so all of this is assuming you've already put in those 10,000 plus hours to get to this point but even with all that and the partners I've always put my own money into every project that I've ever done which is why I've just never really made my money back but another person who has gone a similar way as what I'm talking about here is Seth Worley in 2010 I was working a full time job as a video producer at a large publishing company on their events team where I was turning out videos for their various conferences and summer camps everything I made at this job I would post on my Vimeo account and would note in the descriptions what gear and software I'd used to make it which I mostly just did to show off but it ended up also getting me noticed by one of the companies whose products I was using red giant one day I got an email from a guy named Armour but know what's saying hey I'm the head of marketing at red giant and I just watched a venture now so on and watched it he was interested in making an original short that could serve as a marketing tool for red giant something that stood on its own as a narrative short but had a behind-the-scenes piece attached to it that could show off how red giant products were integral and executing it Oren's budget was 10 grand which for how ambitious the short was going to be who was really tight but Arne said and this was the thing that was more powerful than money he said you can give out as much free software as you want which meant we could offer to pay people and free software software which was valued at thousands and thousands of dollars without this we couldn't have made plot device for ten thousand dollars even writing it around available resources like my brother my parents house props from all videos including a yellow button we had sitting around our office despite all of our practicality it still came down to paying people for their time and the software is what gave us the power to do that this only really works once by the way once people have the software it doesn't really work anymore again mine and Seth's paths are somewhat unique and specific something more common nowadays is something like crowdfunding which I think has plenty of pitfalls of its own and a very small chance of success of you being realistic and again isn't something that you should even consider trying unless you can show people what you're capable of delivering first but since I have never done a Kickstarter myself I asked my friend Ryan Pauley to talk a bit about his experience every film that I've directed has been self-funded but with pizza time my ladies short we decided to take a different approach so to do the concept justice I knew that we needed a bigger budget so we decided to go to Kickstarter we ended up raising about $19,000 on Kickstarter and with some of the personal money that I put in as well as the money the maker table our production company put in we ended up having a budget of about $35,000 pizza time was my first Kickstarter and I knew that I needed to put a ton of time and research into making it successful so I looked at other successful Kickstarter films and studied their campaigns what did they do right what did they do wrong now Kickstarter's all or nothing so that means that whatever money you set at the beginning of your campaign you have to reach that goal in order to get your money that created a lot of pressure for me but it's pressure that I need it because I was really kind of treating this Kickstarter like a full-time job putting a ton of time and research and to making sure it was a successful campaign you really want to make sure it's the rewards that you give out or realistic for your campaign for us we gave a lot of digital rewards app but we also had a few physical rewards like pins and posters that are gonna be a little bit more expense can eat into the budget that we set out to get for the Kickstarter you really need to be smart with those rewards look at your budget and see at the beginning of your campaign what that money is gonna go towards so what I've heard from Paulie and everyone else that I know who's done a Kickstarter say that it really is like starting another business altogether and if you were going to go that route you got to make sure that you're able to pull it off the way that you say you can and deliver what you say you can to your contributors another unique perspective comes from Colin Levy colin is a filmmaker that's done several short films but most recently Skywatch which I'm sure a lot of you have already seen he had a very large production that spanned years and had you know Jude Law I've probably made 30 or so shorts over the last 15 or 16 years they really run the gamut in terms of scope and scale and direction value my first shorts of course were terrible and were made for no money and my latest short Skywatch which I released on YouTube a couple months ago had a budget of north of $100,000 which is a lot of money this project wouldn't have been possible without all the ones that came before I found like in general I've sort of been leveraging the work I've just completed to do whatever is next I made a film called suburban plight in high school it literally starred my dad I shot in my backyard probably had a budget of 15 bucks but it came out well and that's crucial to this whole narrative because once you're convincing people down the line to help you out they're gonna look at that previous work and make a determination how do you make good stuff without resources well for me the secret weapon has been time I spent a year and a half on that six minute short in high school shooting going back and editing realizing what I needed going back out shooting more for free cuz it's my dad and I can grab him and force him to do stuff know what astonished looks like via static that's for a few years I made a movie called enroute in film school we had a budget of $3,000 and in this film which is about an airline pilot we had three or four different types of aircraft we got two fire trucks and an ambulance for nothing our budget almost exclusively went to food again we were able to do a lot with a little and where did the money come from in that case my own pockets but to make that project happen I was literally pointing to two suburban plight my high school movie and saying hey look I made this don't you want to help me make my next thing so in 2009 I got involved in a project that I did not put together myself but I was hired to direct literally half the budget came from DVD pre-sales for them it was very crucial to build an online community that has also been pretty crucial for me I have to say people who've kind of followed my work and a lot of those people have ended up supporting it financially when I did my first Kickstarter in 2011 again I was pointing to Syntel I was pointing to on route we were able to raise over ten thousand dollars and that became the entire budget from my senior film in film school and then just to skip right ahead to Skywatch this project was different from anything I've done before because we actually found independent financing which never happens because you can't make money on narrative shorts this one is a little bit different because it was a proof-of-concept it was designed to essentially sell as a sales tool for a feature film how did I find the money for Skywatch well again it was because of my previous work production on this film was entirely financed by a guy who I maybe had met one time he reached out years prior via email because he was a fan of my previous work he wanted me to potentially get involved in a different project and something he was writing and putting together but essentially fostering that relationship keeping him posted you know I know this didn't work out but I have a sci-fi proof of concept short that I'd love to make let me tell you about it fortunately he came on board and that got us through the week of production in 2014 and then again I pulled out my secret weapon which is time and spent years in post chipping away doing targeted reshoots for no money on my own gear and eventually it was going so slowly we decided to do a Kickstarter but because of my previous Kickstarter I could point to that and say hey like well I did this Kickstarter which was successful watch the movie it's pretty good it got a Vimeo staff pick don't you want to help me make my next thing so you have to start small and everyone does and over time it doesn't happen overnight but as you improve as your work improves as your relationships grow it is possible to be doing work at a higher level without necessarily having a bunch of cash in your own bank account I'm gonna need some tech support so there are a lot of avenues you can take to make your film happen and getting a budget for your production it's great but to close us out I wanted to emphasize the point of our last episode most of my short films have been made for little to no money at all and that's not even counting all the shorts I did before film riot all of those were home video cameras done for zero dollars I think it's really important to remember that while getting a budget is great it's not mandatory for making something great you can spend next to nothing or literally nothing and still make something that will get you into Hollywood making massive feature films like Shazam to prove my point here's someone who did exactly that when Lata and I made our horror shorts we didn't have any budgets we had tried a couple of times to get grant money but were unsuccessful so for example when we made lights out we had to make do with what we had and we did have some things I had recently done a paying job that enabled me to buy a black magic camera and to light it I had bought a couple of cheap knock off redhead lights on ebay from China that I made sure to turn off between every take because I was afraid that they were gonna catch fire in fact there's a moment in lights out when you hear this electric buzzing sound that was recorded from those lights and we had a IKEA paper lantern and a 300 watts photography bulb that I found on a flea market for like a dollar why a 300 watt bulb for that well I wanted to make sure that we could shoot really low ISO and get really clean images with all the darkness and for dolly moves I built my own dolly went to Ikea to their bargain section and found a piece of shelving that I could put skateboard wheels on and then use PVC pipes as tracks and we didn't record any sound that was all done in post because we didn't really have any dialogue and that gives you more control you know every little creaky footstep in the film I selected and placed by hand and it was all finished and resolved which is free and for the audio I used Reaper which is very affordable audio software and for the monster at the end that was a combination of Photoshop and blender blenders free Photoshop snob but there are some open source alternatives like credo or so it was a very low budget affair but the thing I've learned about the difference between professional tools and the DIY no budget tools it's basically two things I mean one is reliability you know professional gear will just take a beating and go on forever while you know my dolly you look at it wrong it will fall apart and the other thing is ease of use or frustration because you know professional gear just works really cheap gear you run into problems like when I was buying rods to rig out my camera I bought really cheap ones that were not made to spec so they didn't quite fit and I had to use a hammer and like my ND filter have like an open-door policy for UV light so sometimes I would get really red footage and had to work with that in post and this monitor turns into a mirror and sunlight so cheap gear will cost frustration and take a lot of extra time but the big advantage when you're making zero budget shorts is that for you time is not really money if your dolly requires extra takes to get just right you can do that and if something doesn't work you can like let's try it again tomorrow or the next weekend or whenever we have the time you know as long as you're willing and able to you know spend the time and effort and you don't mind dealing with frustration you can do a lot of cool stuff with very little money it just won't be easy big thank you to all my friends who took their time to send in their experiences please check out the links in the notes below to see their films each one of them is immensely talented and all of them have great educational content as well so definitely check those out and until next time don't forget to write shoot edit repeat [Music] [Music]

Channel: Film Riot

Views: 190,549

Keywords: film riot, triune films, ryan connolly, filmmaking, tutorial, how to, adobe, film school, david sandberg, lights out, shazam!, colin levy, skywatch, jude law, seth worley, ryan polly, budget, film budget, get money, filmmaker, money for film, short film, make money, visual effects, film, filmmakers, behind the scenes, movie, low budget, short, cinema, independent, short films, director, movies, making of, bts, diy, tips, hollywood, indie film, filmmaking tips, filmmaking 101

Id: hvDJ1a1j6Xc

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 12 2020