The goal of every filmmaker is to create a cinematic experience. The big screen presents a challenging environment that must captivate the audience. How do low-budget filmmakers fill the screen with images and sounds to compete with mainstream Hollywood’s unlimited resources? Films become movies when the filmmaker can make them cinematic and appealing to a broad audience.
Sound
What makes a movie a movie is sound. Most filmmakers will fail because they do not understand the importance of sound. In production, it is not possible to capture sounds that the audience expects to hear on the big screen. Most filmmakers are visually driven and overlook the importance of sound. Your audience wants to hear footsteps and the sound of a door opening. Find a competent sound engineer who can help you in production to capture clean and usable sound. Have enough money in your budget for recreating sound effects, sound editing and sound mixing. Without them, you do not have a movie. They are essential in creating reality in your film.
A Vision
Have you ever watched a movie and felt that you are watching 3 or 4 different films? What kind of movie was the director trying to make? Was it supposed to be funny or dramatic? Why was the theme in the first act completely missing from the rest of the film? Why are the characters’ personalities changing for absolutely no reason? Films fail because they lack a unified vision. You as the filmmaker must understand what the movie is about and what type of movie you are making. If you don’t know, nobody else will. It’s your job to understand the script backwards and forwards. You have to know the characters as if you have known them for your entire life. What’s the point for each scene? What are the motives for each action of your characters? How does one scene connect with the next? Having a unified vision for your movie requires effort and commitment. Know what your characters want and why they want it. What do they want from whom? And what do they need from whom? The low-budget world offers filmmakers the best opportunity to have a single vision because most often it is the filmmaker’s personal journey and life experiences.
Acting
The big screen demands good acting. Your job is not necessarily to find great actors but to find actors who can play the characters in your script. The world of low-budget filmmaking is full of solid actors who have yet to be discovered. It’s great to have a named actor, but it is probably out of your price range. You can find competent actors just about anywhere in the country. Your local film commission is a good place to start. Another tip is to check local theaters as well as talent agencies.
Editing
Now that you’ve shot 120 minutes of footing, do you use it all? Not if you want your movie to be viewable. Good filmmakers will trust their editors to make decisions that will tighten the film and give it the proper pace to hold the interest of your audience. You may have to lose scenes that are your favorites because they do not work within the flow of your movie. Good editors know where to cut. A few frames here or there can make the difference between a solid movie and a disaster. This may be a cliché but editors often say that they helped save the movie. Sometimes filmmakers have to be willing to discover the movie in postproduction.
Transitions
Transitions is the process through the use coverage shots that help to get you from one place to the next. Most filmmakers don’t think about this during production. Most scenes are shot out of sequence over the course of several weeks. It’s easy to get lost in the process. Without thinking about transitions or how the film flows from one scene to the next, you could be looking at a complete disaster. Movies require a change of time and a change of place. As a filmmaker you must make this seem fluid. If the audience doesn’t understand how the scenes tie together, you are in deep trouble.
How to get good at this is to watch a lot of critically-acclaimed movies to see how they handle transitions. There’s no reason in the low-budget filmmaking world that this should be a problem.
Dolly
Films look cinematic when you move the camera. There’s just something about putting a camera on a dolly with tracks to shoot your scene. It looks big league. I realize the tendency in low-budget filmmaking is to go for handheld shots. Resist the temptation. At least put your camera on a tripod if you don’t have the time or money for dollies and crane shots.
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