Inside the Secrets of Crafting a Micro-Budget Feature Film with Ashley Scott Meyers: Hollywood’s Best-Kept Formula Revealed
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.
