I understand that, with a green screen and using CGI to the max, you can really, really cut costs down. The fan films are doing it that way, and they have some pretty good stories. Anyone have any ideas?
Be careful about basing your strategy on these as examples - there's a big difference between fan/amateur work and commercial work.
CGI has cut costs down, but they don't go away entirely. It still takes a lot of hours by skilled people to pull off convincing CGI. When you look at something like a fan film, and what it cost to make, it generally doesn't account for the time most of the people are putting into it.
I call this the 'shadow budget' - the crew time that isn't actually paid for out of pocket.
For instance, look at any of the 48 hour projects my team has done - our typical budget for a 5-7 minute short is in the $100-300 range. That covers food, props, costumes, grip rental, etc for the weekend, but doesn't cover any of our time.
So our typical crew for one of those projects is about 5 people - camera, director/second camera, assistant director/gaffer, sound, producer/props/costumes. Add 2-4 actors. Two of us do most of the post, so we don't have separate people for that. Time-wise, when we do those we're working on a hard deadline. We have to cut corners and make compromises to get everything done under the deadline. To realistically do our best work on a similar project we'd probably need 50% more time then we typically put into our films. But for argument's sake we'll just look at the time we actually put in - figure 7 people minimum, putting in 30-40 hours each - about 200-300 man-hours.
Federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour. That gives you an absolute bottom 'shadow budget' of $1500 - $2200 for labor. Our work was done in CA though, where minimum wage is now $9/hour, which pushes us to $1800 - $2700 minimum for crew time - so that's going to vary depending on where you are.
That doesn't count any overtime, of which there is quite a bit in projects like that. It also doesn't count much equipment rental because we own most of our own equipment, at least $20-30k in camera, audio gear, and post equipment total. It doesn't count production insurance (just covered over our individual freelance business insurance) or permits (we shoot guerrilla style). It really doesn't include any pre-production either.
So leaving all that aside, lets call it $2-3k for our crew labor. Is that really realistic though? It's entirely likely you might be able to find a crew to work for minimum wage, but the work you're likely to get out of them is unlikely to be at the quality level you're looking for or need for a commercial production. I haven't worked for minimum wage since 1994. If you came to me and wanted to hire me for a similar project I wouldn't be charging you minimum wage. My freelance rates vary, but at my lowest rates that $2-3k would barely cover my time, let alone the rest of the crew. The most recent similar project I did for a client on my own cost them over $5k, and that was with no additional crew, no on-set audio, and the entire cast being comprised of company employees.
You'd be looking at probably $10-20k minimum to hire us all to do a similar project - a 5-7 minute short film. If it was a really compelling project we might be willing to do it for a significant discount, but that doesn't scale to a feature length project. I can afford to give you a few days at a reduced rate, but if you need me for several weeks or more you're having to compete with real projects paying full client rates - so it actually costs me far more monetarily than the discount I'd be giving you. And if you're asking me to do it in my free time your project better be pretty damn amazing to compete with the personal projects I'd normally be working on when not doing client work.
So that's the reality of amateur vs. professional - we can do our own projects for about 1/100th of what it would realistically cost you to hire us (or anyone with the necessary level of skills & experience) to do a similar project for you. If you base your budgetary considerations on the out-of-pocket costs of an amateur production you're not looking at things realistically, unless you yourself are willing to put in the time to develop the skills yourself and build a team of similar people who are all as invested personally in the project as you.