Music and Composers

One of the last touches to your film is the music and film score. You must understand both the long and short term ramifications of how you approach this decision. Sales agents will often tell you to score the film with the most popular songs to make the film sound as similar to a studio and the most commercial possible. However, your film budget will probably not be large enough to buy the rights to the songs so you are putting them in your film with the hope that whoever buys your film will pay for the song rights. This is often a major mistake by filmmakers because buyers will often deduct such a cost from your purchase price. The even worse outcome is that no big studio wants to buy the film and the offers for video assume you own the music rights and then you have to rescore the film with songs your movie budget can afford and hope that the distributors / buyers still want to buy your movie.

My advice is to hire a music composer within your movie budget who can create music that sounds creatively right for your film. It's also a good idea to create a package deal with a music composer that includes all the music and songs in the film. The composer best understands how much everything will cost and will probably be able to get the best deals due to his/her relationships in the music industry. Also, their creative and financial interests are alligned with yours assuming that they care about their career.

You can get a sample film budget at www.quickfilmbudget.com

Costume Designers

The costume designer must always have doubles, triples and quadruples of every clothing item no matter what genre of film but especially if it's a horror movie. Imagine shooting the gory slasher scene. You have the blood, the film, the actors everything except you only have one of the costumes and no replacements! This limits your shoot to just one take. Rarely can filmmakers get away with capturing everything they need in just one take. So if your costume designer (maybe you're wearing that hat too) must choose between two costume- always pick the one with doubles and triples for multiple takes. Remember this advice and hopefully you can return the unused costumes to stay under your film budget.

Trailers

Of course, the quality of the feature film itself is extremely important when selling it to distributors. But an important tool used to sell it is the trailer which is about 60-90 seconds in length and conveys the genre, tone and scope while featuring the stars in the film. Most sales agents will demand a trailer before they agree to sell the film. As a result, make sure that your film budget includes a line item for either "Sales Materials" or "Trailer".

Here are some helpful tips in creating the trailer.
1) Hire a professional trailer editor. There is a difference between a feature editor and the trailer editor in that a trailer editor only has about 100 seconds to convey the entire message and they generally know what kind of shots to look for to create the trailer.
2)Look for an editor who has access to editing equipment so you don't have to pay for an avid.
3)The trailer editor should have a resume of other trailers in the same genre.
4)Most importantly, make sure the trailer rocks!

Domestic and Foreign Sales Teams

We all wish film financing was like having a wealthy uncle who could write a check so we could make a movie for however much we want. In reality, filmmaking is based on a reasonable business model where the goal is to make a profit. As everyone know, profit is defined as revenue minus expenses. After you have assembled your film package, foreign sales agents will evaluate it off of the three most important elements: 1) What is the genre? 2) Who is the director? 3) Who are the actors? Based on these answers, the sales agent will estimate the value of the revenue on the film. Unfortunately, most filmmakers never learn this simple concept which is used to value every film sold before completion. I used to work for a film finance company and I was amazed that they never read the script!

Now that you have a professional estimate of your film's sales revenue, you know that your film must cost less than that to make a profit. It is at this point, that you create your film budget by taking the total desired budget amount and back into each of the accounts.

If you would have first estimated your budget based on the script without any consideration to sales, your rich uncle could stand to lose a lot of $$$.

Film Budget Process

Recently, a line producer wrote a Tweet about www.QuickFilmBudget.com: "Need detailed script breakdown b4 budget. If you back into a number, you change the script to fit the budget. Not ideal."

I would say that this person is approaching budgeting in the traditional way taught in film school where you first read a script, break it down by schedule and then determine the film budget. However, today's market forces filmmakers to rely on their own salesmanship. For instance, if a recent film school grad wants to make a horror film, the current market determines that it should be made for a $1-2 million with no known actors or about $10 million dollars with known stars. This all assumes that the film is intended for domestic and foreign sales. ("Paranormal Activity" is a one in a million lottery winner.) Most indie films work backwards from an amount that investors are willing to give. To start the budget process by scheduling and breakdown is a dreamer's approach in today's indie world. Also, Quick Film Budget is a tool for getting started for the cost of $149 and not intended to be the actual shooting budget. The difference is that we admit that up front whereas UPM's (like the one who wrote his criticism on Twitter) sell their budgets to filmmakers in need of a budget for a typical price of at least $1000 without clarifying that their budget is also a road map and a true shooting budget will have to be created-- When? After the total budget number is raised and the budget will have to "backed into that number".

Cinematographer

Choosing a cinematographer is a complex decision that is based on artistic taste and budgetary constraints. For example, it would make sense that if you are producing a slapstic comedy, that you would hire a DP who had worked on other comedies as opposed to a DP who had only worked on sad dramas. The lighting of a scene contributes tremendously to the emotional response of the audience.

The other consideration is your budget. DPs who have only worked on big studio budget films, may not know how to effectively a light a shot on a short schedule and smaller lighting budget. Studio films generally film 1-3 pages of a script per day as opposed to an independent film which usually needs to film 3-6 pages per day. Sometimes, you may find a DP with experience in both worlds and the ability to light on any size film budget (Keep those DPs as close friends!)

For a guideline on how much to budget for a cinematographer and his lighting equipment, check out www.QuickFilmBudget.com