I had initially done a very short and basic ‘budget’ for my short film when creating my treatment, I decided that once I had completed my production and was onto post-production I could reflect on this and pick apart what my budget would have looked like more realistically. In this blog I wanted to go through a list of the resources I used and how much that costed as well as anything I would have to consider if this were a professionally done short film.

First though, here is a screenshot of my original ‘budget’. I didn’t really understand how much detail this needed to seem professional when I was initially creating this and so I didn’t really do any research into this. I decided to be brief in this as for this project, when creating this, everything was either free or I already owned, that changed a little once I got going with the production so this blog will be discussing the prices of all my resources so that I can put together a more accurate budget for what this film would have needed.

Equipment: My equipment consisted only of my Canon 750D DSLR camera and my Neewer RL-12 Ring Light, both of which I owned prior to the time of working on this project. However the camera is priced at around £350 – £500 (some places charge different and I can’t remember where exactly I bought it from) and the ring light was around £100.

Locations: Both locations I used were completely free for me to use as the first location was my own home and so I didn’t need to and still don’t need to factor that into the budget. The second location was a barn at a friends house and so, again, I had nothing to pay for, however, theoretically let’s put this at between £50 and £100 a day to hire out.

Actors: Again, my actors were all free and were happy to help with no pay as they were all either family or friends, however, I’ve had a look on the internet and it seems many people would say between £50 and £100 should be an average pay for acting in a short film (https://www.quora.com/How-much-should-you-pay-an-actor-for-a-short-film & https://www.reddit.com/r/Filmmakers/comments/3i9yfo/for_a_student_project_how_much_should_i_pay_my/). So multiplying that between the 4 actors I had this would come to between £200 and £400 just for actors.

Post Production: All of my post production was done at college in our edit suite, which means all the editing software is already paid for by college and I didn’t have to put any money towards this, just my time. Although for the sake of putting together a budget, I want to see how much Final Cut Pro actually is so I can gather an idea of how much I may have had to pay. According to Apples download link it would cost around £299 to download and use and own myself.

Travel: I thought it would be important to factor in the cost of the travel, and as I did all the driving to and from all the locations (including to and from Cumbria) but didn’t really know how to accuratly estimate the cost of my travel. So, I went onto the AA ‘Mileage Calculator’ and entered my route into there and it gave me this:

 

Since I did not only do this journey once, but 4 times specifically for filming, plus a little extra driving within the two destinations, this would work out to around £50, give or take just for the travel.

Costumes & Props: The majority of my props were old mirrors I found at home and that I had prior to filming or even planning this project so I won’t factor those into the budget, and then the majority of the rest of the props were found at the location once I was there and I had permission by the owner to use them all for free. Having said this, I did buy a lot of extra candles for my practical lighting, I bought 4 sets of 5 candles at £4.25 a pack from IKEA, so that is an extra £17 onto my budget.

In terms of costume, I bought 3 black hooded cloaks online for my cult member actors to wear during the nightmare sequence, these were £14.99 each and so came to £44.97 all together.

Promotions: Since I did my own promotions for this short film on my Instagram, I also don’t need to fator in a price for that, but, since I was planning to enter into film festivals – which due to these prices, I didn’t end up doing, but may still do since many of the deadlines are still open until later this year – I felt it necessary to factor in the submission fees for the three film festivals I looked into entering.

Below are the screenshots of these submission fees, all together totaling $72, roughly £59:

Overall Budget: So, now, adding up all the prices my budget at its highest would be £1570, and at its lowest would be £1000, overall pretty expensive for what ended up being only a 4 and a half minute long film.