Shooting Film on a Budget

I played around with the idea of calling this article “How to shoot film on a Budget”, but it isn’t very detailed and I can’t remember all the exact prices and different costs all that well anymore (for instance, things like the cost of costumes or how much was the exact price of the rawstock). But, believe it or not, I managed to produce and direct a feature film for the sum of $10,000 on 35mm film. Yes, I cut a few corners here and there, but the biggest reason I was able to produce a film on such a micro budget was that I did my homework (and I had a lot of help from some very good people, namely the cast and crew!). I shot with an affordable Konvas 35mm camera and used props that I had access to (thus saving money, because I didn’t have to buy too much).

One big area I managed to save on was buying the rawstock film; I used inexpensive recans and shortends. I specifically chose the even less expensive expired film over 16mm for the visual effect it gave, as I wanted the film to be grainy (I wanted it to resemble the old westerns), but not as soft as 16mm. For those that don’t know, a frame of 16mm is roughly 1/4 the size of a frame of 35mm – so it’s softer, because the resolution isn’t there. This is the same in digital still photography. Blow up a 3MP picture versus a 12MP picture to a 2ft wide by 3ft tall poster. You’ll quickly see which one is softer. But I digress…

Due to the nature of buying shortends, I had a lot of film that, after we shot it, almost looked like fresh stock (probably due to better storage), but I had a few cans of film that gave me a fair amount of grain. A select few cans had an extreme amount of issues. One can of film was even mislabeled. I shot it exposing for 500T (with a 85b daylight filter, it reduces it by 2/3rds of a stop and would mean I was actually exposing for 320D), but it came back so underexposed that it was not salvageable (actually, I’m not stating the full truth here either. Since I was shooting old stock, I overexposed everything by about a half stop extra).

As stated above, a majority of the film was shot with a 500T film. To be exact, it was mostly shot with Kodak’s older Vision 5279 (a 500T film), but I also used a few cans of other Kodak stock (namely 5277) and one or two cans of Fuji’s 250D. Each of the cans of Kodak was snip tested and labeled, meaning the same stocks were supposed to be fairly close in their look… And yet they weren’t (although they were all labeled within the same D-min area, which was roughly R:15, G:55, B:85). Let’s just say that the D-min numbers are a good way to explain how your negative will handle shadows, grain, and contrast. Shooting the film in 16mm and a film rated at 500ASA (meaning more grain) would not have given me the same effect. As stated above, it would have been softer due to resolution differences between the formats, which was not the look I needed or wanted for an action film. Another reason for 35mm was that I was also able to get a shallower depth of field.

To makes things easy on myself, I processed everything at a local lab and had them do the telecine transfer to DigiBeta. To save even more money, no workprints were made.

BTW: At the time (mid-2004), it was about three times more costly and much harder to locate a post facility that was transferring to High Definition (the local lab did not do High Definition transfers at the time). I remember calling one lab and they quoted me a price of $17,000 for the transfer alone. That was more than my entire film budget, so I thanked them and decided DigiBeta was good enough…