Writing the Low Budget Screenplay
Last week, I announced that I was accepting submissions from paid subscribers for the low-budget Lifetime thrillers that I’ll be producing later this year. So far, I’ve received a lot of interest which is fantastic!
One of my subscribers asked if I’d be willing to write a Substack article about what you can and can’t do (as a writer) when writing at this budget level, and since so many of you are coming up with concepts right now, I figured this is the perfect time to address that subject.
So here are the basics that writers should writing the low budget thriller.
First of all, no one expects you to be able to figure out a feature budget the way a line producer would, so don’t think you need to read books on producing and budgeting in order to write for a lower budget. Just by following a few rules, chances are your screenplay will fit the low budget guidelines enough that a producer will recognize it as a ‘do-able’ script.
What constitutes a ‘low’ budget?
There are a lot of definitions of ‘low budget.’ Even the WGA and SAG have different definitions. In the non-union world, it can mean anything from $150K to $1.5M. And believe me, there’s a lot more you can do for a $1.5M budget than $150K budget. Sometimes you’ll hear people refer to films being ‘micro-budget’ or ‘ultra-low budget,’ and there are no clear budget ranges for those terms either.
For producers and distributors, it’s a numbers game. They have to look at what the current market is paying for a film and then obviously make the film for less than that amount in order to carve out a profit for themselves. But, the film has to have good enough production value to be salable. If they spend too little, and the film doesn’t pass QC and doesn’t align with the level of production value expected by the distributors and buyers, it doesn’t matter how much or how little they spent making the film—it’ll be a loss if it doesn’t sell.
From my experience, it’s very difficult to get the level of production value needed to sell a film if you’re only spending $150K. You simply don’t have enough to rent the proper equipment, hire enough experienced crew to shoot in the fewer amount of shooting days you can afford, mix sound properly, color the film, and pay for the all the extras like title search fees, clearance fees, copyright fees, and all the other delivery costs that the buyer will require a producer provides.
I’ve also seen novice producers spend way more on a movie than they need to in order to give it better production value than its competitors. While better production value can set a film apart from others, there is a threshold in which it doesn’t matter. For example, if a producer spends $700K for a film and it looks better than a $600K film, but only marginally, and the buyer doesn’t care about the added production value of the $700K film (meaning the $600K film checked all the boxes of what they needed), then the producer who spent $700K will make $100K less than the producer who made their movie for $600K. In short, producers want to spend as little as possible, while still ensuring all the boxes the buyer wants are checked, to maximize their profitability.
As a writer, there are a few things you can do to make your screenplay more attractive to producers who are looking for low budget scripts.
Number of Locations
Reducing the number of locations is essential. To truly understand why this is important, you need to know how films are scheduled and shot during principal photography.
Most low budget films are shot on a 10-13 day shooting schedule. So, for 10-13 days, the producer pays the full crew (expensive!) to be on location, working about 12 hours per day. Most of the time, an experienced crew (even more expensive because people with experience in their department make more than people who are moving into a position for the first or second time) that knows how to move quickly and doesn’t make any mistakes that eat up time, can shoot 9-11 pages per day.
On the first day of principal photography, the crew must ‘load in’ to a location. That means they must bring all the trucks that carry the equipment, costumes, dressing room, HMU equipment, props, set dressing, craft services, etc., park those trucks (or take turns parking and moving those trucks depending on how much parking is available at the location), have additional crew to unload everything on those trucks, set it all up, organize it, and then decorate the set, set up the camera and lights, and prepare for the first scene to be shot. This takes considerable time. Depending on circumstances, it can take one to three hours.
The time it takes is deducted from that 12 hour day. If it takes one hour to load in, that means the director has only 11 hours that day to actually shoot those 9 – 11 pages. If it takes three hours, she has 9 hours of actual shooting time.
When the crew finishes with a location, the same thing happens but in reverse. They ‘wrap out’ the location which entails packing everything back up and loading it back on the trucks so that they can move to the next location. This process takes, again, between one and three hours depending on circumstances.
So that means, if a crew has to load in and wrap out on the same day, the director could lose between two and six hours of shooting time, making it difficult (or even impossible) to reach the goal of 9 – 11 pages per day.
Now, if the crew is shooting for three days in the same location, they only load in once (on day 1) and wrap out once (on day 3). When there is no wrap out, it’s called a ‘walk-away.’ Literally, the crew can leave all the lights up, the camera and gear inside the location, the costumes and HMU and production office all just stay the way they were, and the crew ‘walks away’ at the end of the day, and returns the next day to pick up where they left off.
Walk-aways are great because there is no time wasted on those days wrapping out. And they’re great for the next day, too, because there’s no time wasted on loading in.
I hope you see where I’m going with this.
It’s better to have fewer locations because that means fewer load in’s and wrap out’s and more time to actually shoot scenes.
If you have your crew moving to a different location every single day by scripting 12 different locations for a 12-day shoot, the director loses a minimum of 24 – 48 hours of paid crew time over the course of the shoot just moving from location to location because there are no walk-aways.
Bottom line, having a crew stay at a location for at least two days, if not more, is ideal.
Now let’s do the math. If a director can shoot 9-11 pages per day, then for a location to be used three days in a row (meaning one load in, one wrap out, and two of those nights being walk-aways), how many pages must you script at one location for that to work? Go ahead and do the math. I’ll wait.
Hopefully you said 25 – 31 pages (this is a rough estimate because certain types of scenes take longer to shoot than others, so on day 1, perhaps the director only shoots 8 pages, but on day 2, when there’s no load in or wrap out, she ends up shooting 13).
Explanation of the math: 9 x 3 = 27 (minus the minimum load in/wrap out time of one hour each) is 25. 11 x 3 = 33 (minus the minimum load in/wrap out time of one hour each) is 31. Nine is the minimum number of pages they can shoot in a day while 11 is the max (usually). Each of those numbers multiplied by three shoot days gives you the range.
Now, those pages don’t fall back to back in the script. To figure how many pages you’ve scripted at one location, you need to count (using the eighths method of screenplay page counting) the length of each scene you’ve scripted at that location. For example, if you have a scene at the protagonist’s office on page 10 which lasts one and three-eights of a page, and then another scene on page 18 at the same office that lasts two and six-eighths of a page, you’ve written four and one-eighths pages at the ‘office’ location. In order to shoot a full day at that location, you would need to write more scenes that total between four and seven-eighths pages to six and seven-eighths pages. And because you’ve only written enough scenes to suffice for one day at this location, you should consider that there will be a load in and wrap out, which will reduce the number of pages that can feasibly be shot that day, closer to the 9 total pages than 11.
But, this is all just to give you background on why reducing locations is important. While I think it’s worthwhile to actually count how many pages you’ve written per location when you finish your first draft, the easier way to look at this is to just script fewer than 10 locations. Eight locations is ideal. You never want to spend too much time at one location because the audience visually gets bored, so having eight locations that you can bounce between throughout the script keeps the film shootable for a low budget, but makes the film feel visually more robust to the audience.
Types of Locations
While the number of locations impacts how many pages (and scenes) a director can shoot during principal photography, the kinds of locations matter as well. Some locations are more expensive than others.
There are three things that make a location affordable:
Easy to contain for production’s needs
Low Displacement
Fewer background players
I’ll go through these one at a time.
Easy to contain for production’s needs means everything production requires can happen at that single location. For example, a house is an affordable location because there are lots of rooms to shoot in, extra rooms for the production office, HMU, costumes, and dressing rooms, there’s a garage or back yard that can accommodate the lunch tables for thirty crew members, there are bathrooms for cast and crew to use, and there is a driveway which makes loading in and wrapping out accessible.
Compare that to a city park which may require equipment to be carted from a parking lot several yards away. There may not be restrooms, or a place nearby to process actors’ hair and makeup or house the production office (which all need access to power and possibly internet), to walk an actor across the street to a building to fix their hair or change their wardrobe or to go to the bathroom is time consuming and requires production to not only spend money renting the park, but also spend money renting an additional building. A house is contained. A park is not.
Low displacement means the cost of a location is cheaper because it’s not preventing the location’s owner from making money. I’ll use the house as an example again. When you rent a house, you displace only the people who live in the house (whom you will need to put up in a hotel or Airbnb). When you have a restaurant as a location, you will be displacing a day’s worth of customers. Let’s say, the restaurant you want to shoot at makes $5000 per day in profits from selling food to customers. To close the restaurant down for one day will cost you at least $5000 or more, whereas you can very often pay a family to move out of their house for one day at a cost of $1000 plus $250 in hotel fees.
Obviously, there are some scenes that do need to be in places other than houses and you shouldn’t script a scene that makes no sense because you put it in a house instead of a restaurant (like two people going on a date for example). But can you have them go on a picnic in a scenic area instead of a restaurant?
The general rule for these budget levels is the more days you script in a house (cheap), the more money leftover to have 3-4 ‘higher-budget’ locations that bring production value to the movie.
Some locations are simply too expensive to shoot in for obvious reasons. An airport for example is astronomically expensive because while it’s contained, you can’t fully shut down a terminal (I don’t even know what it would cost to do that).
Fewer background players keeps costs down. For example, a scene in a house requires no background players (unless you’re scripting a party or something that would require some). However, scripting a scene at a mall or a hotel or anywhere else where there would be lots of people is going to cost a lot more. If you need your characters to go shopping, scripting them at a standalone jewelry/fishing/clothing/etc. store instead of a mall is better for a low budget script.
Number of Speaking Roles
Another way to keep budgets low is to reduce the number of speaking roles to ten or fewer (including your leads). Each character that speaks, even if it’s only one word, costs the production more than if they didn’t speak.
For example, if you script a scene between two characters in a restaurant, instead of opening the scene with the server taking their order which would require the server to speak, start the scene mid-way through the meal so that only the two central characters talk.
Another example… if you script a scene in a conference room, in which ten people are sitting around a table, instead of having five of them interact and ask questions, have only two ask questions and the rest can just listen. That would reduce the number of speaking roles in that scene to two.
Something else to remember… once a character is a speaking character, they are paid the higher rate each day they work. So let’s say you have a character that speaks once at a school. But then you have a car wash that the school is putting on at a different location. If you bring the speaking character to the car wash scene, they will be paid the higher rate for that day (even if they don’t speak at the car wash) because they were cast in a ‘speaking role.’ So if they don’t need to say anything in the car wash scene, don’t script that we see them there.
I always go through my screenplays when I’m finished and count the number of speaking roles (FDX will create a report that gives you this info by the way) and if they only speak one or two lines, I try to rework the scene to eliminate their lines.
In addition, try to limit the number of scenes that have multiple people talking. For each person that speaks in a scene, the director will need to get coverage of that actor. It takes almost twice as long to shoot a scene with eight people talking as it does with four people talking. So avoid putting lots of people together unless necessary (a funeral, for example, would require us seeing several characters who knew the deceased while having a scene with just two characters still sitting in the church after everyone else has left to go to the cemetery, takes less time to shoot).
Once you understand why certain things cost more or less in production, you can use that knowledge to figure out how to keep costs low and make your script more attractive to a low budget producer.
One word of caution. Like I mentioned previously production value is still important. A movie that takes place in only three houses with no ‘set-piece’ locations, will look small and cheap. A movie that only has a few characters that speak, will also feel small and cheap. Don’t fixate on the ‘rules’ to the point that your script feels small and boring and visually uninteresting. No one will want to make a script like that even if it can be made for very little money. The key is to be creative with your locations and economical with your speaking roles.
Until next time, happy writing, friends.
Christine Conradt has been a screenwriter/director/producer/author for more than three decades. Her films have aired on Lifetime, LMN, Hallmark, Hallmark Mystery, Showtime, USA, Fox, Amazon, and Pureflix.
This is such valuable info. Thank you.