Small Film Budget?

Excerpt from SUGOD interview

(An online magazine featuring Filipino Artists located in Saudi Arabia)

6. What does it take to produce multi specific genre films w small budgets? Camera gear had become accessible. Video Production and Photography is a skill that you can now learn. What makes you different from many is Creativity and Ideas. But even that, you can learn and develop through extensive research, studying and practice. Because of this, every project you will encounter now has a “limited budget.” Let’s face it, they don’t take our jobs seriously. We all like to groan at that and complain and use it as an excuse to justify why the end product didn’t come out as we’ve planned. Because of small budgets, our creative windows become small too. Yeah, I’ve said that before. But I know these are just excuses because there was also a time when all I had was a Canon 550D with kit lens, a tripod and a laptop that could barely power an editing software. As basic as my gear was, I still produced videos. It wasn’t my best work. I did it for practice and because it was just a hobby of mine. Until a friend of mine told me what her then fiancé thought of my camera work. According to him, he thought one of my videos was shot with high budget. Today, most projects I come across has a “tight” budget. The only solution to that is to work around your budget by modifying your creative content. Approach the job with a goal in mind that you intend to finish it the best way you can. Always know and understand that no matter what, this small budget project has your name attached to it. Always remember the times when you have produced with little resources. Technology is supposed to work for us, not the other way around. So to answer the question, what it takes is to be creative, have technical know-how, a strong determination and a problem solving mindset. My biggest example when it comes to this will always be my first feature film Madayen, my Producer Hakeem Jomah had two different offers from bigger production companies, they will finance the production but they must modify the script first according to how they see fit. I sat down with Hakeem and we decided to go rogue instead. We didn’t want our first film to be bastardized, we wanted it to be raw and we wanted to make mistakes, but most of all we wanted to walk away from a finished product that we can say, all it took was creativity and guts… we learned earlier on this year that the film had gone to win 4th place in the International Horror Hotel Film Festival, who was also paneled by Hollywood Director, Guillermo Del Toro. I still take pride knowing all we spent on making that feature was some pocket money for food and a lot of time modifying the script simply because we didn’t have the luxury to film using certain equipment.