Welcome to Microbudget Filmmaking: When Documentary Subjects Become Crew
I was just looking through the old Proceed and Be Bold! production photos for some to put up on the new 20K Films website, and I found this one of documentary subject, Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. carrying one of our tripods for us! HA!
This is basically what happens when you’re on a microbudget production although how an $18,000 budget is considered a microbudget is shocking to me. Although I just did hear recently from another documentary filmmaker that her past doc had a $540,000 budget, and that you need at least $80,000 budget to make a documentary. Which is definitely true if you are going to pay your crew.
Otherwise you have an $18,000 budget like we did on Proceed and Be Bold! which managed to pay for all of our camera and editing equipment, send us to Italy, and helped us travel to 4 different states for interviews for the doc. We ate, slept in decent hotels, but no we didn’t get paid.
So far, our new doc, SICK CELLS has racked up $1,000 so far, but that’s not the budget which I still need to put together. That’s just expenses I have been paying out of my pocket in order to get us going. There was a lot of free crew work in the past year and a half that we have been making this documentary, but at this point if I can’t afford to hire crew, then I’m doing all of the shooting on my own. I’m also updating the 20K Films website on my own as well as running our Quickbooks File on my own too. 
Welcome to the new microbudget future of indie filmmaking. For the record, I love making documentaries, but it really kind of sucks having to do so much on my own. C’set la vie. Enough of my pity party.
Here’s an interesting blog post by Mynette Louie, who just made the Sundance accepted film, CHILDREN OF INVENTION, about Why Microbudget Filmmaking Sucks. I read this via the blog Truly Free Film which is a great resource for reading about what is going on right now in Independent Filmmaking.
