Do you think it's possible to shoot an AMAZING feature for under $10,000?

Do you think it's possible to shoot an AMAZING feature for under $10,000?

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I see, Flapper. I guess I have a different view. Strictly legally, it's the production LLC that's responsible - there's a reason why it's called "limited liability". If the LLC has assets of $1, then that's what's at stake. If the injured party is a member of the LLC, then things look entirely different again from the point of view of lawsuits - and members can be non-voting, and hold only 1% of the LLC, so even here there are wrinkles upon wrinkles - for examples multiple holding companies, where assets are sequestered and liability is therefore also sequestered. You know, it's actually not even about the $10K, because you don't need to put $10K in the LLC. I don't want to go into excess detail here, because not only is it long and complicated, but nobody should be getting legal advice from a post on the internet. Please consult a lawyer. Because I can plainly see you have not explored this with lawyers specializing in this, including those who concentrate their practices on "piercing the corporate veil". My point is simple - you can structure the LLC in such a way that from a strictly legal point of view you are protected and protected very well indeed.

That leaves the moral dimension. And that comes down to this: of course, as a friend, or simply responsible project leader, you want to do the maximum you possibly can to insure safety and in case of injury give compensation. But, you can't get blood from a stone. If you don't have assets - really don't, and not merely by dint of a well-structured LLC - you can't do more... it's not dependent on your will or willingness. So you warn your volunteers and make them aware of the risks and the fact that you can't do anything in case things go wrong. At that point it is up to them to take that risk. The LLC is there only for strictly legal protection from the state (in your example: "Stunts aren't the problem. If someone trips in a gopher hole walking to the set and breaks their leg the production company is legally responsible, and their health insurance will come after you." - and they'll get nowhere fast, if you have done your job with a properly structured LLC), or lawsuits.

If you've taken care of the legal and moral dimensions of this, you can ask, well, do you have the right to make that film then, if you can't afford to compensate people for possible injuries? Everyone will answer it their own way. I'm with the thousands of filmmakers who over the decades have decided to go ahead (examples of which I've given), to not only their personal benefits, but the benefits of all involved in the project. I may have bad luck, but that's the risk I must take. You may not wish to.

EDIT TO SAY:

I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Please consult a qualified attorney.

And seriously, I urge every filmmaker to invest a bit of money in a legal consultation. This is what you should do: get a basic book covering the issues (I gave a link to one earlier). Once you've absorbed that, go ahead and pay the $200 to consult with a lawyer who has experience in this very specialized field, to make sure you understand what risks are involved and how to structure your LLC. It will pay off, for a long time - our society is increasingly litigious. Make sure, before a production, to consult again, in case the law or practice outcomes have changed.
 
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That's a good question. If you are illegally on someones property I don't know if they'll pay claims that occur there. Why worry about that case? Sneaking into a military base to shoot some footage? It's really not hard to get permission and sign a Location Agreement with the landowner and just do things legitimately to start with. That's done every day and quite often for $0.

What I meant with my answer is that you don't have to send location agreements to the insurance company for them to issue a policy. The terms of the policy will dictate if you being illegally on a location invalidates their coverage.
 
Snazzy Flapper said:
That's a good question. If you are illegally on someones property I don't know if they'll pay claims that occur there. Why worry about that case? Sneaking into a military base to shoot some footage? It's really not hard to get permission and sign a Location Agreement with the landowner and just do things legitimately to start with. That's done every day and quite often for $0.

What I meant with my answer is that you don't have to send location agreements to the insurance company for them to issue a policy. The terms of the policy will dictate if you being illegally on a location invalidates their coverage.
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I was speaking to your comment
Insurance underwriters don't care if you have permits
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Because technically (even with permission from a private business/homeowner), as soon as you include public streets/areas in your shots, you "don't have permission" without permits; and in most states, police presence.

A slippery slope, I know.

My point was:
Ideally get legal/insured...but if not, be all the more smart/safe.
 
Giriki said:
I can't see how sub-10k films and life-threatening risks could be related to each other, but maybe you will tell me.
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It's really not a long journey. I helped with one just recently which involved dangling a kid over the edge of a parking garage roof. Surely it can't be that hard to imagine.
 
David Jimerson said:
It's really not a long journey. I helped with one just recently which involved dangling a kid over the edge of a parking garage roof. Surely it can't be that hard to imagine.
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But see... that's not responsible filmmaking at all if they were actually dangling the actor over the ledge... not without enormous safety precautions that would be far outside of a $10K feature film budget.

There are many ways that you could shoot that without actually putting anybody in danger.
 
agcohn said:
But see... that's not responsible filmmaking at all if they were actually dangling the actor over the ledge... not without enormous safety precautions that would be far outside of a $10K feature film budget.
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Regardless of whether they did or didn't take the precautions (they did), it was still a situation which came up in a film of that kind of budget.


There are many ways that you could shoot that without actually putting anybody in danger.
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Also not the point. Besides, most of those would either increase the budget or decrease the quality of the shot, most likely, so they wouldn't be the first choice.
 
Accidents can and do happen, regardless of whether you're making a whiz-bang action film or an emotionally-charged melodrama. You can kick the tripod with your leg and smash a Red One, a jib or light can fall on someone, or an actor or crew member can simply put their foot in the wrong spot and break their leg. All of these can cost significant amounts of money. Feel free to play fast and loose with Lady Luck, but if she comes back to bite you, it's not going to be pretty.
 
Another vote for something I personally would not do. Too risky.

It cracks me up that some see me here as this wild-eyed irresponsible guy, when in real life my friends joke that I'm way over-cautious in these matters. You ask the average guy shooting a short or a no-budget feature if they have nested LLCs for production, intellectual property and the like, and they'd laugh - heck, the very guys I cited, Tarantino, Lynch and so forth, none of them did. Yet, my risk tolerance does not allow for that. I pull out reams of paperwork to sign, and people's eye's pop "on this little project?". And no way, no how, will I dangle a kid from anywhere, or even work with a child - I'm too risk averse. And yes, I get paperwork from the property owners (doesn't cost anything). All this, and yet here I'm portrayed as some kind of pirate.

Everyone has their risk tolerance level. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as you know and understand what the risks are - and this is where most people fail, in either direction.
 
Or, you know, you can get electrocuted just running lights. Especially if you don't have the cash to pay an electrician to sign off on their safety. Didn't someone post in the 'cinematography' section a picture of a 1K light on a stand next to a full bathtub, and the light stand didn't have sandbags on it.

And if you think life threatening risk and low budget filmmaking are mutually exclusive things, tell that to the NYU film school kid who's getting sued over a crew member's death that I linked to a couple of pages ago.
 
vcassel brings up a good point. With these low-budget films, you're probably not going to have many (if any) members of the crew who would fall under "seasoned professional," so how many seemingly innocuous things on set could actually turn out to be dangerous that no one will even think of until it is too late?
 
Hopefully you have a great lawyer and great accountant making sure your super-wizbang nested LLC structure will really protect you when and if the crap hits the fan. The "Corporate Veil" is pierced all the time in small productions like this. Doing things properly costs money and expertise. You sound like you've thought that far ahead.

Personally if this were my venture I'd try to raise more than $10K, so I could do things legitimately and legally, but hey, different strokes. Setting an arbitrary number like $10K just "because" seems like an artificial constraint that forces you into making poor decisions to start with.
 
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Am I one of the rare people that believes its part of the filmmakers job to raise the funds to make his movie to ensure that the crew and actors and the director themselves are paid to do their job? If you can't do your job correctly, why should you expect it of anyone else?

Disclaimer: this is born out of frustration for all the "filmmakers" who are making their films for nothing but expect, no, demand, that their crew bring their hard earned gear and experience to their set. Now if you are making it with your buddies and are not expecting the world out of strangers, then I say go for it! But if your the kind of guy that does a cast and crew call so that people who owe you nothing can sacrifice for your vision, then go do your job.

I have had too many experiences with guys in their freshmen year of film school asking everyone to sacrifice so much for their vision. They have a story that must be told. The question is, must the story be heard?
 
The "Corporate Veil" is pierced all the time in small productions like this.

Which is why I recommended earlier, to talk to a lawyer who has experience with "piercing the corporate veil". And why I'm quite anal about the way I do things, even if it sometimes irritates people ("why can't I just use my credit card and you can give me the cash later?" "Because I want you to bring me the bill and I'll pay with this particular card" etc.).

No question if you don't know what you are doing, you're cruising for a bruising. On the other hand, you cannot let paralysis overtake you - take care of the legal stuff early on and thoroughly, then concentrate on getting the film made. Note, most successful filmmakers who started out with these micro projects (examples I gave), never even went this far. I'm already way, way more careful - perhaps because of where I used to work, I've witnessed how lawsuits can bog down and destroy. So I'm a bit OCD on that score, and have developed a strict approach.

Can accidents happen? Always, on any budget. Your suggestion is to not make a $10K feature. But as I've indicated repeatedly, this is at a divergence with the real world and how other people have made it (a million directors etc.). I can't tell people what to do - there are no guarantees. I can only report on the level of risk/reward ratio I'm willing to contemplate.
 
No, I think the general suggestion is to spend some elbow grease trying to get more money for your production so you can hire the right people, purchase the right insurance, and do things the way that are supposed to be done.

Unless, of course, the story that is trying to be told isn't worth that extra work.
 
filmmakerguy said:
Here's the thing, movies like FOLLOWING, EL MARIACHI and PRIMER were made for around $7,000. However they were all shot on 16MM film. If you do the math on it, pretty much ALL of their budgets was spent on film and processing.

The thing is we live in a new age of film making where the equipment is there that you could either borrow, rent or buy and have better looking HD footage. So in the end, you could put a solid $10k into your project that isn't dumped into film and processing. You could have much more invested IN FRONT of the camera than behind it. So when you think of it in these terms, you'd see how possible it really is to make something great, at least better than FOLLOWING, EL MARIACHI or PRIMER.
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Exactly. There's a lot of strange what-if scenarios going on here. If someone is intent on making it, they will. If not, they won't. It sounds as though there are as many mental barriers to starting than physical ones to stopping a person from taking on this challenge.
 
No, I think the general suggestion is to spend some elbow grease trying to get more money for your production so you can hire the right people, purchase the right insurance, and do things the way that are supposed to be done.

This is kinda funny. It's as if raising more money is going to be an unalloyed good that's not questioned - more money, how could that be bad? Only, there are complications aplenty. Money comes with strings attached, and those strings may strangle your production - happens all the time, on much bigger budgets... if you haven't seen it personally (and I have, repeatedly), just read up on it, see what Tarantino and Bender went through trying to set up RD - several times they were close to accepting $ in exchange for making bad compromises or hiring some financier's relative for an acting role. But forget that. Forget all the strings on the money.

Let me tell you something else about "hiring the right people, purchasing the right insurance" and doing things the way "they are supposed to be done". You see, once you have that machinery in place, you may discover that you are severely limited in time and ways of working. Because the insurance will only cover a given production over a given time, not in aggregate, and the pros you hired are on a strict schedule, and you'll have to pay overages if you deviate, and because you're doing things the way they're "supposed to be done", your costs explode just based on that, with all sorts of union and guild and other things that only keep mushrooming and you'll end up having to raise much more money than even the "extra" money you raised... and the whole thing is just stupid. Tarantino - and a million other filmmakers - didn't do that AND COULD NOT DO THAT on their micro projects. And yet, without the micro project, they'd never have gone on to do the film the way you recommend: "get more money for your production so you can hire the right people, purchase the right insurance, and do things the way that are supposed to be done" - because they'd have never taken that first step to allow them to even reach that. Tarantino would never have done RD without MBFB.

Really, this recommendation "raise more money get insurance right people blah, blah, blah" sounds so right, how can anyone object? Only it doesn't work for so many. Again, do what you need to do. That's not how the West was won - not through everything being insured and accounted for and by the book and by best practices with a seal of good housekeeping from Homemaker Magazine.
 
Gary Huff said:
No, I think the general suggestion is to spend some elbow grease trying to get more money for your production so you can hire the right people, purchase the right insurance, and do things the way that are supposed to be done.

Unless, of course, the story that is trying to be told isn't worth that extra work.
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This is the right attitude, I think. Yes there are lots of extra strings attached to money, but if your film isn't worth dealing with the hassles, why make it? It obviously isn't important enough to you. If filmmaking were easy, everyone would do it. It takes those of us willing to go the extra mile to make a solid film.
 
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I don't understand what you are saying here. Could you clarify? You say: "a LEGAL responsibility that needs addressed, and a release form isn't going to protect you when someone is injured." OK, what do you mean? Sincere question. Are you saying:

1)You, the project leader, will be on the hook - and that's bad for you and your finances down the road?
2)You, the project leader, will be on the hook - and that's entirely appropriate, because you are in fact responsible for the volunteer, so step up and do the right thing and pay the man for his injuries?
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Yes, and yes. And the LLC won't protect you as thoroughly as you seem to think. And even if it DOES, it will do so only after you've spent large amounts of time and money in court. There's no "automatic" protection... there's protection that you can defend in court.

Further, on a production where you are dealing with volunteers and favors, the legal protection of an LLC is a lot less than in a clean employer-employee or paid contractor situation.

And, as to "caring" or "not caring"... saying "of course I'd care if that happened, and try to help" is one thing. Caring enough to insure that you can take care of such a situation is another.

The idea here is this: making a low-budget film, there are some things you can do without, and some things you can't. For the things you can't do without, you wheedle and bargain or find volunteers or pay. You expend a lot of creativity and some money in getting those resources. The question at hand is, when deciding what things are necessary, do we include protection for those involved? If it is the case, wheel and deal and be creative in whatever way it takes to make it happen. Find someone to volunteer insurance, or bargain a great rate. Film an insurance agent's daughter's wedding in exchange for a break. Do all the things you would do for any other aspect of production; maybe you can find a way to make it happen. But don't dismiss it as necessarily something that can't be done on a budget.
 
OK, folks, if the same points keep popping up and it's all about "uh-huh" and "nuh-uh," then we're at EOL. We're at over 1,000 posts now, so maybe things have run their course.

There is much to discuss here; I suggest taking your favorite points of interest and starting threads in the appropriate forums.

Example: marketing a $10K film in unique, creative, eye-popping ways. How to do it? Seems like an excellent conversation for the Business section.

Another example: best bets for writing a film which can be done and done well for $10K. Sounds like a good thread for Screenwriting.

Business structures? Again, great for the Business section.

What are you most gung-ho about? Go discuss.
 
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