![]() How long will you research, shoot and edit? Are there any special constraints, such as a tight shooting window or an immovable delivery deadline? No budget can exist without a schedule, and every (inevitable) schedule change will affect the budget.Īs a final preparatory step, list the key assumptions that define the budget. Are you making a longitudinal vérité film over many years? An urgent investigation? An archival essay? A docu-fiction hybrid?Īs your concept crystallizes, sketch out a schedule. Thus, before you can think about your budget or schedule, you must think about your concept. Changes to one of the three “corners” of this triangle will always affect the other two. In film production, I’d make the corners of this triangle the story itself, the schedule and the budget. If you want something fast and good, it’s not going to be cheap. There’s an adage that I love called the “Triangle of Quality”: “Fast, cheap or good-pick two!” This means that if you want something cheap and fast, it’s probably not going to be very good. Ideally, it is also a living document that can help get a film to completion. This is show business and our work is half “show” and half “business,” whether on a huge doc financed by a studio, or on a passion project made by a lone filmmaker in a small town, who must wear all hats herself.Īt the center of much of this “business” is the budget, which offers a map of the filmmaking process, expressing both the film you’re planning to make and how you plan to make it. Yet after embarking even timidly on a first project, it quickly becomes clear that there are also crews to be hired, workflows to suss out, schedules to draft, and money to be raised and spent. And we spend years in the field and the edit room, working through the labyrinthine, wonderful, frustrating process that documentary-making can be. We strive for cinematic ways to bring those stories to the screen. ![]() We pursue people, stories, issues and ideas that fascinate us. Editor's Note: This is a fully revised look at documentary budgeting, and updates the 2006 Documentary article “ Don’t Fudge on Your Budget: Toeing the Line Items.” It was recently presented as a workshop at Getting Real ’18.Īs filmmakers, we yearn to immerse ourselves in the creative process.
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