Image by Clive Andrews

Filmmaking with little money is not the best situation. Just as in life, you would not choose to have no money. No movie director wants to have to come up with a unique way to eat when buying food would be so much more pleasurable. In low budget filmmaking you will rarely be in a position where you can make the movie the easy way. Low budget directors will not be able to solve important movie making problems by throwing money at them. These filmmakers will be on a perpetual mission of invention and re-invention. Lots of filmmaking stuff a director already learned will turn out to not work for many movies and lack of money will often be the source of the difficulty.

With not much money to make a movie, a director needs to get creative with how the film is actually made. Here are a few ideas a film director might have to resort to if there is not much money to make a film.

35mm Stills

Every filmmaker wants to shoot on 35mm film. The colors are richer and the contrast more intense. If you do not have much money you will not be able to shoot your film on 35mm film, but that is not to say you cannot have any 35mm footage in it. 35mm still cameras are readily available and cheap. Buying and developing 35mm still film is convenient and easy. If you want the look of 35mm, take some stills and incorporate them into the film to get that look you want at least for a portion of the film's running time.

Dub Dialogue

In making your film with little money you have to work with what you got. You may not be able to get a location that is quiet enough to record decent dialogue. The location may be near a freeway, next to loud neighbors, or have an air conditioning system you cannot turn off. If you are not able to get good synced dialogue, do not fight it. Instead of recording the dialogue when you shoot the scene just record it later and sync it as best you can, having the actors say the words as they watch their performance. When it doubt, dub it like Robert Downey, Sr did in Putney Swope.

Use Free Music, Samples

You have no money for paying people to make music and no money to license any. Instead of getting your film in trouble when you are sued over inserting music you did not have the rights to, just find music you can insert for free. With the creative commons licensing that is proliferating you might be able to find something that fits pretty well. If you cannot find just the right song, use some royalty-free samples and create a minimalist score for your film using Garage Band or some other simple music production package. Do not go without music if you need it, but do not overlook all the free alternatives either.

Bad Acting As Style

You may not be able to find good actors. Or you may have one good actor but the rest are just deadly dull. If you cannot get all the actors to perform at high levels, have them all perform at low levels. It may not be your first choice to have stiff movement and monotone vocal inflection from your actors, but if they all are like that it will be a style. Instead of calling attention to the poor acting by having one actor be much more relaxed and believable, have every actor seem amateur.

Poor Production Design As Joke

If you cannot afford expressive sets, you could make the sets a source of comedy. You might want to have a few set pieces that will give your film that "big" look, but if you cannot afford it you need to go in another direction. Instead of trying to do good production design poorly, do it poorly on purpose. Have the walls be flimsy and almost fall over in scenes. Use the same sets with minimal changes as separate locations in an attempt to make fun of your limitations. This will almost always make your movie campy, but it is better than a trying to be big budget and failing miserably.

Good Actor Voice Over

If your actors are so bad they cannot even remember their lines, you might still have a way out. Even if they are not able to read the lines off the pages in a fairly reasonable manner, you still may have options. Rather than recording their dialogue at all, why not just direct their actions out loud like a silent film director would and later have a competent actor doing a voice-over summary of what they are saying. Rather than having two actors struggle to believably say "I love you" and "Well, I don't love you.", have a narrator say "He pledged his love and she spurned him." Don't struggle to shine poo, just use it as fertilizer.

No Mics, Use Subtitles

You may have a quiet location where you can easily record clean dialogue. You may even have actors that can deliver the dialogue well. If you do not have a good microphone (or one at all) none of these things even matter. If you find yourself in a position where you have the goods but no way to record them, just make the best of it. Just do as a silent or foreign film does and put subtitles where the dialogue should be. Not the best solution, but these kind of tough decisions will often arise in filmmaking.

All of these ideas are strong choices. They cannot be used haphazardly or as bandaids, you need to build the film around them so they make a cohesive whole. You probably cannot just subtitle one piece of dialogue you did not get right without seeming amateurish. A narrator cannot do a voice over for one scene where you could not get a mic but never again speak for the rest of the film, it won't make sense. These unconventional techniques need to become an integral part of the style of the picture. Most of these choices will label your film as a comedy or arty, but that is better than having no film at all.