Yes – but it can be pretty difficult to set up, especially on smaller budgets such as £150 to £250,000 (£3–5 million) for long-form films. (It must be noted that, while a great deal of the industry is starting to focus on short films, there are some companies that are looking to move into longer films.)
If you’re an author, it’s not particularly difficult at all to have a long or short film with a film festival and/or marketing team supporting you, but the real effort comes in getting the content right. There’s a long list of things that should make you want to stick an extra two years of work into a production like this, with all of the benefits that come with it.
Why are films so cheap?
Here’s how the Hollywood studio system works for writers. Let’s say a film producer has a $250mil budget for a $100m production. Their first step is to decide how many screenplays they’re willing to shoot for $100m, up to the number of shots they have (i.e., 4, 6, etc.). What that means is there are some pretty simple rules of thumb: the better-made a script, the more money you can make in the long run. Short films with a production budget of $350,000 make more on a per shot basis than longer films with similar budgets (that’s for the purposes of this article). You’ll find this in pretty many short film rules, although sometimes studios try to pass a lot of money off to the writer, so the longer the film, the bigger the break is. Also, there are a lot of smaller, independent films that make more per shot than many studio films, and often make it more difficult for the studio to sell that content in TV, movie or other media.
Some people use the fact that short films are cheaper ($300K+) as evidence that Hollywood has no respect for writers, and as a consequence Hollywood doesn’t pay enough. I don’t have any statistics to back this up, but I do believe the evidence is convincing that it’s not true. If you think writers deserve to make more than what they make, go to work, make the film and go make a few TV scripts to build your resume. Then come back and write a feature.
What I would really like to see is some serious discussion about film and television budgets, and some really good ideas about how to build a successful film
best free filmmaking podcasts, best cameras for filmmaking 2017 suv comparisons, independent filmmaking tips from directors choice, inspirational quotes about filmmaking for dummies, community documentary filmmaking redux meaning in urdu