My Experience Making an Ultra Low Budget Documentary Film
It was early 2000 when I first had the idea of making a documentary film about enlightenment. I envisioned a video version of Richard Bucke's book Cosmic Consciousness updated for the 21st century by using contemporary accounts of spiritual realizations. Like many ideas, it stayed in the back of my mind waiting for a critical mass of inspiration and commitment. It was not until the fall of 2004 that I purchased a Canon GL-2 mini-DV camcorder. Once I laid down money, I got serious.
My initial equipment looked like this:
Canon GL-2 - $2203.00 from Willoughby's
BeachTek DXA-4P Dual XLR adapter - $169.00 from Guy Graphics - a must have product for decent audio.
Canon BP-945 Lithium Ion battery - $113 from Amazon.com - the biggest battery for the GL-2; another must have.
Audio Technica AT899 mini-lav microphone - $200 from B&H - a nice microphone. I was too cheap to spring for a wireless. In hindsight, I think a wireless could have enabled more dynamic interview footage.
Audio Technica ATM10A microphone - $99.95 from Musician's Friend - a mic that I never used for this project. It's really suited for musician's, not for interviews.
Two 20-foot mike cables - $30
Bogen 3001 tripod - borrowed - Didn't care for the head on this, but it worked okay for interviews.
I did a lot of reading at DVInfo.net before purchasing equipment. Understand that I knew nothing about making a film, nor was I even a serious student of film. I just had a vision for how to communicate the possibility of an ultimate spiritual realization, and to do that required making a film. Being naturally frugal, I wanted to make an ultra low budget film.
In late 2004 and early 2005, I interviewed four people who I felt had authentic spiritual realizations. All of them were within driving distance of my home, so that automatically saved me a lot of money in travel. As someone said, "Aren't there any good documentaries to be made within 100 miles of you?" Well, I travelled up to 500 miles, but that's just a day's drive. Two of the people let me stay at their homes, and I was able to stay with friends for the other interviews. Once again, I saved a lot on expenses. Unfortunately, I should have studied some documentaries before I started filming. I was a crew of one: cameraman and interviewer, which makes it hard to do either job well. My interviews were all sit-down, very static, and all conducted in one day. I should have allowed two days, so I could review footage at night, then had points for clarification the next day.
The project sat on hold for several months after the initial round of interviews. Though I had editing software, I didn't know how to use it, despite buying a copy of Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 Studio Techniques from
. So I spent $175 and flew a friend of mine out for a couple of days to tutor me. That worked great! That friend, Alex Levy, wound up moving into my attic and became co-director of the film. The crew of one was now a crew of two!
Having another person involved, forced me to clarify what I wanted the film to be. We decided to film some young people who were at the beginning of serious consideration of the spiritual path -- asking questions about the meaning and purpose of their lives. We felt audiences would relate to the immediacy of the feelings of these young people, and we could weave their doubts and hopes around the certainly displayed by the first four interviewees.
We began serious editing on the film in November of 2005. My equipment included:
ABS Computer, 2.8 Ghz PC, 512 MB, nVidia GeForce 128 graphics card (a card with s-video and that allows dual monitors is good to have), Creative Audigy 2 ZS Platinum sound card, 120 GB hard drive -- $1200 from
ABS Computer Technologies.
500 GB Western Digital hard drive - $250 from
- very nice to have lots of hard drive space. Buy.com has consistently good pricing on hard drives.
20" Emerson TV - $99 from Wal-mart - for use as an editing monitor
Swivel monitor stand - $0.00 - made from the base of a discarded office chair.
Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, After Affects, Photoshop, and Encore
In January 2006, we conducted our "young seekers" interviews. Fortunately, I knew a group of people meeting regularly in Pittsburgh, so we could interview them all at once. Alex was cameraman and I was the interviewer. An improvement over my first interviews, but of course a third person would have been better. Without a boom mike, the sound suffered. I used my mini lav mic taped to the center of a table. At least I had a plan for the content of this round of interviews. Plus, we stayed two days, so we got footage other than sitting at the interview table. On the way back from Pittsburgh, we stopped at two of the people previously interviewed and got some b-roll footage.
Ah yes, b-roll. Little did I know how visually boring a movie made entirely of people sitting in chairs and talking would be.... The content was interesting, but the eye got tired. This was the point in this process, where I finally started studying documentary filmmaking. How did good filmmakers make interviews interesting? Our model became Errol Morris, and specifically, his film "The Fog of War." Though much of the time we simply wondered, "how did he do that?" studying his films was inspiring and gave us hope that we could avoid "visual detritus" and make a truly interesting film.
We collected stills from our interviewees, and I scoured the web for free content. Archive.org and Flickr.com were godsends. There is public domain footage if you are willing to search for it and many people will let you use their photos simply for a credit in your film. I wound up only paying for one piece of footage: $15 for a ten second animation from Revolution Stock Media.
Many, many hours went into editing and filming b-roll -- mainly because my initial footage was so poorly planned. We had a lot of mistakes to cover-up. Basically, all of 2006 was spent on b-roll, transition sequences between interviews, and music. Alex has some talent with Maya software, so he undertook to illustrate some ideas I had regarding capturing the feeling state of a spiritual realization. Most of those ideas are still unrealized. With our present tools, crew, and state of knowledge, those scenes were simply too ambitious. The music, however, turned out nicely. Thanks to my friend Doug White and his friend Don de Leaumont, we got a great score for free. I don't know what we would have done without Doug. Also, I found some great royalty-free music from Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com.
We mailed three draft versions to friends during the editing phase. This was of great benefit. It's helpful to send your film to people who probably won't be that interested in the topic, as well. We would collect all the comments, then look for common points.
As of March, 2007, we have an 80 minute long, spiritual documentary ready for submission to film festivals. To date, I estimate I've spent between $4000 and $5000 dollars on this project and it has absorbed almost all my free time over the past year. I don't know how to put a price on my labor, Alex's labor, and Doug and Don's. If I'd had to pay all the people who have helped, this film would have never happened. Clearly, friends are critical to ultra low budget filmmaking.
With the film made, the next step is marketing. See my article Marketing a documentary for what we've learned to date.
If you have any questions about what we did and how we did it, send me an email.