In 2012, Sarahjane Swan and I set about putting together our first short experimental film, In The Dark I Sat. We had no budget, so we decided to make a No Budget Film. The only way to make a No Budget Film is to plan the thing, write it, film it and do any post-production (editing, effects, sound etc.) in your spare time, using equipment, resources and locations you either already own, or can easily beg, borrow or purloin.
A lot of new filmmakers
feel uncomfortable putting their time and effort into an
under-financed cinematic work, no doubt assuming that quality will
suffer, that there will be a barrage of accusatory snipes from
critics and peers - “amateur!”, “underachiever!” - and that
the finished result will be a shoddy shambles fit only to be seen by
their Mum, their Shrink and the Family Pet. This need not be the
case.
If you do a bit of
research, there are many examples which prove that, with talent and
determination, a filmmaker can create a work of great quality and
merit on the tiniest of budgets. Many of these filmmakers have gone
on to have successful careers in the mainstream, often managing to
keep a modicum of creative control as it is their individual style,
vision, message and/or technique which have put them there in the
first place.
Think of America’s
Grand Surrealist, David Lynch, whose struggles financing the
production of his first feature, Eraserhead, included having
to work a succession of menial jobs, borrowing cash from the cast and
crew and contemplating completing the project with Ray Harryhausen
style stop-motion animation. There is seemingly a scene in the film
where high-haired hero, Henry, walks through a door one moment and
when he arrives in the next room it is several years later. This was
not a Lynchian absurdist plot device designed to unsettle and
confuse. It literally took that long to get the next scene financed.
Eraserhead, which was started in the early ‘70s, following
soon after Lynch’s student shorts, was finally completed and
released in 1977. The project cost very little, in a monetary sense,
but its vision was so original, disturbing, beautiful, haunting and
terrifying that it blew the cinematic world apart and propelled Lynch
into a kind of Alternative Mainstream, if such a category can exist,
of big budget widely distributed movies and media attention.
This example shows
that, because of the hurdles and restrictions in place due to lack of
resources, the No Budget Filmmaker requires huge levels of stubborn
persistence, originality of thought, resourcefulness, time and energy
to produce work of a high quality. You’re right there on the
frontline, soldier, dug deep in your trench and you’re going to
have to improvise constantly, using whatever is at hand to edge your
way forward. There’s sure to be a torrent of problematic shrapnel
flying at you from every which way, so remember to duck.
Here's another example:
The tale has oft been
told of how director, Robert Rodriguez took part in clinical drug
trials to help finance his first feature, El Mariachi (1992),
made for just over $7000. Rodriguez utilised the talents of mostly
amateur actors and shot over the Border in Mexico, using 24 rolls of
16mm film, which he later bounced onto video for editing, as this was
the cheaper and easier option. In his 10 Minute Film School
video, which you can track down on YouTube, Rodriguez basically
advises those starting out to dig around in their own back yards for
the clay from which to sculpt a memorable work: “When I did El
Mariachi, I had a turtle, I had a guitar case, I had a small town
and I said 'I'll make a movie around that'.”
He had intended to sell
his Spanish language Western to the Latino straight-to-video market
to bring in funds towards a bigger budget project, but the Mexican
distributors he approached showed no interest. So Rodriguez took a
different approach and mailed out trailers of El Mariachi to the
larger US companies. Columbia loved what they saw and on viewing the
full feature financed a 35mm print, promotion and distribution which
reportedly led to $2 million brought in through the box office. With
profits like that it is no surprise that Rodriguez was soon seen as a
director who could successfully bring in a project well under budget.
He has gone on to make countless mainstream films, including his own
Mariachi sequels, Desperado and Once Upon a Time in
Mexico, as well as From Dusk Till Dawn with Quentin
Tarantino and the Spy Kids movies.
This is where the No
Budget philosophy of filmmaking kicks in. Where is the rule which
emphatically states you can’t create your cinematic wonders with
Zero Finance? If you’re resourceful enough to use what you already
have and borrow the rest you can work out some way of tapping those
visions in your head and releasing them into the world in all their
filmic splendour.
Do It Yourself! That’s the motto you should pin above your bed so that its message is engrained into your psyche from your waking moments. Punk Rock encouraged the DIY gene in all of us to kick into action on a grand scale but the handmade, self-published, fully autonomous work has been there in art from the very start: from the Modernist pamphlets and manifestos of the early 20th Century, and William Blake's illuminated volumes back through the aeons to the cave-painters of pre-history. There’s no shame, only glory in taking full control of the means of production, distribution and promotion. The technology of today makes creative production and delivery even more accessible than it was in the halcyon days of home recording, zine publishing, graffiti and mail art etc.
Do It Yourself! That’s the motto you should pin above your bed so that its message is engrained into your psyche from your waking moments. Punk Rock encouraged the DIY gene in all of us to kick into action on a grand scale but the handmade, self-published, fully autonomous work has been there in art from the very start: from the Modernist pamphlets and manifestos of the early 20th Century, and William Blake's illuminated volumes back through the aeons to the cave-painters of pre-history. There’s no shame, only glory in taking full control of the means of production, distribution and promotion. The technology of today makes creative production and delivery even more accessible than it was in the halcyon days of home recording, zine publishing, graffiti and mail art etc.
Sarahjane and I discussed what kind of short we would like to create and
came up with the vision of an avant-garde science-fictional love
story about individuals trapped in alternate realities in the aftermath of a
quantum level catastrophe, “The Fluxing”.
We
wanted our first
film to have a fragmented structure and feel. We've always loved a trend
in the Modernist creative arts which seems to reflect the disjointed nature of the contemporary world and the fractures this causes in the modern psyche. It is as though the artist has glimpsed the world in the shards of a smashed mirror and attempted to piece together a patchwork reconstruction of it.
In Fine Art this approach can be seen in the early collage work of Picasso and Georges Braque, the Dadaist photomontages of Hannah Höch and John Heartfield, the Frankenstein-like sculptural constructions of Merz founder Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg's Neo-Dada; or the symbolically cluttered installation work of Louise Bourgeois's Cells. Examples of literary Shard-ism can be read in the postmodernist fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, the cut-up word-collage of William Burroughs / Brion Gysin and Kathy Acker and the hip '60s New Worlds New Wave Sci-Fi of JG Ballard and Michael Moorcock.
In Fine Art this approach can be seen in the early collage work of Picasso and Georges Braque, the Dadaist photomontages of Hannah Höch and John Heartfield, the Frankenstein-like sculptural constructions of Merz founder Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg's Neo-Dada; or the symbolically cluttered installation work of Louise Bourgeois's Cells. Examples of literary Shard-ism can be read in the postmodernist fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, the cut-up word-collage of William Burroughs / Brion Gysin and Kathy Acker and the hip '60s New Worlds New Wave Sci-Fi of JG Ballard and Michael Moorcock.
Shard-ist Music? Look to the sampling of early Hip Hop or to Captain Beefheart's collision of early blues,
rock, free jazz, outsider music and Beat poetry.
The easiest way for Sarahjane and I to translate this Smashed Glass approach into a cinematic form seemed to be for us to raid our own catalogue of DIY music videos. By the time we decided to make In The Dark I Sat, in 2012, we had already produced an album's worth of these under the name The Bird And The Monkey.
Obviously there were
initial costs in purchasing a camcorder and an iMac several years
earlier but, other than this, In The Dark I Sat literally cost
us nothing to make. It was premiered in London at the Portobello Film
Festival in 2012 and later that year screened in Scotland at the
Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival.
In my next post I'll look at the benefits brought to low budget filmmaking in the 21st Century by developments in digital technology.
Roger Simian collaborates with Sarahjane Swan in The Bird And The Monkey and low budget experimental film project AvantKinema-DIY
A sample of the script for In The Dark I Sat is available to read in the Flux issue of ABSC_ND magazine. Turn to page 289 to read.
In my next post I'll look at the benefits brought to low budget filmmaking in the 21st Century by developments in digital technology.
Roger Simian collaborates with Sarahjane Swan in The Bird And The Monkey and low budget experimental film project AvantKinema-DIY
A sample of the script for In The Dark I Sat is available to read in the Flux issue of ABSC_ND magazine. Turn to page 289 to read.
