Thanks for all the responses. APE, I'm still waiting for you to tear my plan apart
OK, my pleasure!
Please bare in mind I do not profess to be an expert in this area, my expertise is in sound for film/TV, I've never been a producer. My advice is solely based on my 20 years as a professional in the business working with professional producers and directors. I have very little experience working on/with the tiny budgets that most indietalkers are used to, I have worked on a couple of tiny budget projects but the vast majority had budgets ranging everywhere from the tens of thousands up to several with budgets in the $6m region. I certainly don't pretend to have all the answers and I'm therefore not going to try and give any! I'm just putting forward some suggestions based on extrapolations and general principles of those professionals I've worked with, general principles which I believe are applicable to virtually any budget level.
Beyond taking it to film festivals, you don't really say what your intentions are for your film. As you state you are following on from the other thread, I take it you are looking to get a return on the $15k you have available and recoup your costs or make a profit, rather than looking at this film as just a personal project/learning experience? If it's the former, I would say that at the moment you don't really have a plan, you have an idea to make a film but not a plan! Like the vast majority of amateur filmmakers with an idea for a film, your first thought is how much budget you can afford and how you can write and make your film within the constraints of that budget. However, this approach seems to me to be completely backwards, relies almost entirely on the hope of almost lottery winning levels of luck and is therefore purely amateurish!!
The first thing you need to do is take a step back from your artistic/aesthetic aspirations for the film and consider that in reality you have to end up with a saleable product. From a business product point of view you have to decide who you are going to try and sell your product to, who your potential customers are, and this is going to require a considerable amount of research, time and effort. Most amateur filmmakers don't seem to think much about who their primary customers are until after they finish making their film, they only seem to consider who their potential secondary customers are, the public who will ultimately view/pay for the product. In the case of something like a youtube film or web-series, you are selling direct to the public, therefore the public is your primary customer and you can plan your budget appropriately. Maybe you can rely almost exclusively on time and effort to market/promote, using only lo/no cost methods of online marketing. If this is the case you might decide to spend almost all of your budget on actually making your film and make a better quality film than you otherwise would have by only spending 2/3 of your budget making the film or you could choose to still make your film for $10k (or even less) and save the rest for another project. Maybe spending $15k on a web-series stands virtually no chance of success without a marketing budget, maybe a $500 budget will drastically increase your chances or maybe you'll need to go to $1K, maybe there is another jump in your chances of success with a $3k marketing budget. This is where the research comes in; what are cost/benefit ratios of the different courses of action and how much risk are you willing to take. The WHOLE point is, rather than just plucking a number out of the air for making your film and marketing, you actually target whatever budget you do have to those areas of your filmmaking which stand the best chance of reducing your risk of failure. This same principle applies to every area of your filmmaking. Again taking a web-series as an example, the web has very low quality expectations when it comes to audio, so you may decide that setting a very lo budget for sound and channelling those funds instead an actor's stipend represents a better cost/benefit ratio. On the other hand you might decide that as the audio standards are so low on the web, maybe spending more on audio represents an opportunity to impress which is worth it's cost/benefit ratio. I personally think in most cases the former would be the most prudent choice but it does depend to some extent on the type of film you want to make.
Sorry we're using some business speak rather than film speak but if you want your filmmaking to be a business (make money) rather than a hobby then surely it's a necessity? The difference between intelligently targeting your budget and largely ignoring the issue because it ruins the fun of filmmaking is the difference between a professional approach to filmmaking and an amateur approach. One is all about reducing the risk/maximising the chances of success, the other is about fun and the impossible dream of walking down the Academy's red carpet.
There are of course more traditional routes for selling your product but with these routes your primary customer is not going to be the public but some sort of distributor or broadcaster. Each different type of distributor/broadcaster represents a different level of potential revenue and therefore has a different product quality expectation and requirement. Obviously, making a product which does not achieve the required levels of quality is the best recipe for financial failure. So, the first course of action is to discover what revenues are realistic, what the quality requirements are and what budget you will need to meet them. In the case of some VOD distributors you might find for example that a realistic revenue for a good film is say $10k, in which case investing $15k in the film would be foolish unless you are very confident you can make a film so good it will attract more than 50% more viewers than the average film which makes $10k. You will need what sort of genres are most successful on VOD and maybe adjust your screenplay accordingly and of course work out the quality requirements and target your budget appropriately. TV is usually another step up from VOD but there are different levels and requirements for TV. While most VOD distribution channels may require consideration of a decent marketing budget, for TV there maybe little need for a marketing budget but instead a plan/budget for getting to meet with those who purchase TV products. Generally, children's TV usually has the lowest requirements and is therefore the cheapest to make, documentaries represent another step up and TV drama another step again. Maybe your film idea would be suitable for adapting for children's TV, maybe it would work as a docu-drama? Obviously there comes a point where meeting the quality requirements becomes unrealistic with $15k. It maybe for example that a realistic budget to make your film as a docu-drama is say $45k, in which case you would have to rely on far greater; talent, contacts, experience and luck, to bridge this funding gap. In practise this will probably mean either taking an unjustifiable risk, shelving the idea for the time being and making something more realistic in the meantime or finding a couple of co-investors.
Obviously, in terms of quality expectations and the costs of meeting them, at the very top is the making of a feature for theatrical distribution and the gap between your budget and the realistic lowest cost is somewhere between 10-100 times. Finding an investor willing to put in that kind of money is extremely unlikely unless there is something very obviously genius about your film idea. Those odds reduce if you have a prior record of making a profit from films, TV content, etc. Another potential or additional route is to take say a third of your budget and make a sublime short based on your film idea, not to make money directly but as promotional material for investors, to demonstrate that you have a great idea and the skill/talent to execute it.
After all this rambling, the question isn't about whether you can make your film for $15k, you could make it for a 100 times less or 1000 times more, your question is backwards. The question is: What do you want to achieve, what are the realistic costs of achieving it, what is your plan to meet those costs and how much risk are you willing to take? You said you want to enter a film festival and that you don't mind loosing your investment. Is the learning experience of making your film and being screened at a festival your desired outcome or do you need to create a product marketable to a particular group of customers? If it's the latter, maybe a film festival is not the route you should looking at or maybe there is a festival which largely caters for your particular group of customers and your plan could include making a product which is simultaneously suitable for both a festival screening and your customer group? In any case, all the above principles still apply. If a festival screening is your desired outcome, then what sort/class of film festival do you want to enter? If it's a major festival like Cannes or Sundance, what are their screening requirements/expectations, how much will it cost to meet those requirements, is there going to be funding gap so big as to make it virtually impossible to meet those expectations, is the risk of trying to meet those expectations so great you are effectively just dreaming? You need to research which festivals are most appropriate/realistic with your budget and then target your budget accordingly. For example, from just the audio side of things, maybe your targeted festival/s can only screen in stereo in which case trying to make a cheap 3.0 mix (or even 5.1 mix) in the hope of getting into a more major festival would be a waste of your resources and you would probably make a far better film (for that particular class of festival) by targeting those funds/resources elsewhere. Ultimately, it all boils down to making the most suitable product for a given market rather than the almost impossible task of making whatever you want and then trying to bend the market to your product.
I hope you now realise that at this point in time you don't really have a plan, all you've got is filmmaking idea and a limit of how much money you can afford to loose. I'm sure I haven't provided you with any useful answers here but maybe I've given you something to think about, something which may affect the way you approach your filmmaking and gives you a better chance of professional success.
G
