The red carpet treament for the creative team behind Drones.
After calling in sick on a Friday, filmmaker Nico Sabenorio bought a last second plane ticket from Los Angeles to Tampa. The ticket and one night in a hotel were his main expenses for his Special Jury Mention short documentary Bout the Bout. To keep costs down for the three-day shoot, he slept in a car the second night and stayed up the third night until his plane left. The movie centers on a high school fight club in Southern Florida and was shot using only natural lighting on a Panasonic camera he borrowed from his employer, National Geographic. He credits a mentor for helping him scale down his ideas into something affordable, which he recommends for other micro budget filmmakers. “It’s tough… but if you develop that skill set and start watching things you like that were done on a budget you can afford, it will start to get the gears turning.”
Bout that Bout's Nico Sabenorio.
Other films take longer to make, like Jeremy Lambert’s feature documentary Biker Fox which took over three years and accumulated over 600 hours of footage. The movie follows the eccentric Tulsa bicyclist, nature enthusiast, fitness evangelist and all around oddball Biker Fox through his highs and lows by documenting his multiple arrests, hand feeding of raccoons, and antics at his salvage auto parts company. Over fifteen cameras were used throughout the shoot from Hi8 to cheap HD cameras – including cameras given to the subject to use on his own. Jeremy’s advice is that you don’t need fancy equipment to make your movie. “You don’t need the latest. You can shoot on VHS. Just use technology that makes sense [for your project].”
Peter Ferdinando and Gerard Johnson of Tony.
While most of the microbudget movies were shot on digital, a few filmmakers shot inexpensive movies on film. For Britain’s Gerard Johnson – writer and director of Tony, the lonely psychopath next-door – his ability to make high quality shorts for a hundred pounds caught the attention of State of Play producer Paul Abbot. He gave £20,000 to expand the short of Tony into a feature. Gerard then went to the UK Film Council and got them to match Abbot’s amount, “which is literally nothing to do on a feature, especially on film,” he says. Next they managed to get Guy Ritchie’s DP from Rockin Rolla who used relationships with Fuji and Technicolor to keep the cost down. Having limited stock helped Gerard to be “more disciplined.” He workshopped the script for six months so that everybody knew exactly what they needed to do. “I was very precise on what I wanted.”
