Jared Moshé recently published an article entitled “The Microbudget is the New Short,” where he comments that the microbudget feature is “essentially the new and improved version of the short film.”
The Beginnings of Microbudget
In 1998 a hopeful article in Moviemaker Magazine summed up the rising phenomenon of microbudget features:
Many of the most talented American independent filmmakers began by making ultra-low budget features. During the 1970s and ’80s, very low budget films launched the careers of David Lynch (Eraserhead), Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep), John Sayles (Return of the Secaucus 7), Wayne Wang (Chan Is Missing), Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise), Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It), and Gus Van Sant (Male Noche). Because they were made on such tiny budgets, these films were regarded as exceptions, not models that other filmmakers could follow. In the mid-’80s the availability of money from home video companies enabled a number of filmmakers to raise $3 million for first features. But this money soon dried up, and by the early ’90s it was harder and harder to find money for first features. Made for $27,000, Rick Linklater’s Slacker was a precursor to the ultra-low budget wave. (The Film School alums among them: UCLA (Burnett), AFI (Lynch), NYU (Jarmusch, Lee) and RISDI (Van Sant)).
Next Wave Films, the fund described in the article, was created by the IFC to help filmmakers finish low-budget films. It now appears to be defunct. Its website, last updated in 2002, has that tumbleweed feel of late-nineties ghost-sites.
In 2010, twelve years later, the microbudget feature world has swelled enough for Sundance to add a new micro-budget section to its festival, entitled NEXT;
The new section, also referred to by the symbol <=> by the Festival, highlights new films that have been made on very low budgets. Rather than vehicles to make money, these films are proudly modest. But make no mistake, this group of filmmakers is not limited by a low budget – they made their films this way by choice.
The studios have also taken note after the success of Paranormal Activity, with Paramount announcing a new micro-budget feature division:
Clearly dazzled by the fact that it could gross more than $100 million on a movie that barely cost $15,000 to make, Paramount Pictures is set to launch a new production wing devoted to films budgeted at less than $100,000.
These are but two of the major waves being made by micro-budgets, spurred by ever-falling production costs. These developments are slow to take hold at film schools, including UCLA, where students often spend small fortunes to make esoteric short films, the pinnacle of which is the thesis film.
The Thesis Film in the Era of the Microbudget
The thesis film is often an extremely expensive endeavor, ranging anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000. UCLA’s biggest thesis grant is the Bridges Larson Production production grant, which offers $25,000 to one lucky candidate with an extensive (i.e. undergraduate) theater background. I once read that at AFI there is a limit of $100,000 for a thesis film budget; I have already heard of two films here at UCLA that, albeit unintentionally, hit the six-figure mark.
This begs the question of how micro-budgets, now an accepted fact in the film industry, are figured into a film-school education; at UCLA, generally speaking, they aren’t. NYU has a well known Columbus/Vague production grant of $100,000 that only NYU graduates can compete for. With production costs what they are now, what was intended as seed money for a feature can now actually become the feature itself. UCLA has nothing comparable to the Columbus/Vague grant, although realistically UCLA does cost about $100,000 less than NYU, depending on how much you spend on your films, and provided you are not an international student.
In light of these developments the thesis film has become a smaller piece of the film-directing career puzzle. Many years ago students attended film schools because the high cost of equipment made them the only viable means of making films. In those days the thesis film, shot on 16 or 35mm, was the largest project most filmmakers could conceivably produce as a means of enticing studios, investors and producers into considering feature projects.
The 2007 edition of Film School Confidential, the only remotely up to date guide on film school education, has a section about life after film school. In it they discuss the reality of the low-budget feature as a stepping stone to the paid feature. They recommend shopping around your thesis to festivals to get to know programmers for your first DV (now HDV or RED) feature;
“Wait, what?” we hear you ask. “Feature? What feature?” This would be your self-financed feature shot on DV. We’re sorry to have to break this to you, but it’s the way the film world has reshaped itself in the digital-video era. You’re going to have to make a feature on your own before anyone else will give you money to make one.
Later in the book they discuss the process of putting your first independent feature together.
So with this new step, where does the thesis film leave you in terms of a career? Film School Confidential would argue, as have a number of other filmmakers, that it gets you some prestige, maybe some meetings, and contacts with programmers for when you return with your microbudget feature. The thesis film will always be an important part of film school, particularly as a culmination of everything learned while in school. For the vast majority of student filmmakers, it will not produce any (monetarily) meaningful directing work, and simply guide them to the next step of making the micro to low-budget feature shot on digital.
For certain people with specific expensive genre and aesthetic sensibilities, the expensive thesis film will still make sense, but for the majority of future independents, the microbudget, festival-ready film will be the next step in their filmmaking career. Therefore ideally the thesis film, and any student film for that matter, should be kept as cheap as possible. Instead of the 18 to 30 minute unprogrammable opuses we are currently seeing, the future of the thesis film is the reasonably cheap 10 minute and under short film.
One of my favorite examples of this is The Most Beautiful Man in the World by Alicia Duffy. The film was her thesis at The National Film and Television School. It premiered at Cannes and is a powerful, visual and brief short. She recently returned to Cannes with her first feature, All Good Children, which I’m very excited to see.
The Film School of the Future
The film school of the future will prepare filmmakers to write, direct and produce a no-budget feature. Ideally every student in that school would leave school with a fully developed, budgeted, scheduled and cast microbudget film in addition to a number of polished feature scripts and strong short. A major advantage of film school is the network of passionate and talented students you meet. These people make the ideal candidates to rotate through each others’ micro-budget films when they leave school.
Mr. Moneybags, Student Film Financier
In America, with little government subsidy of the arts and declining support of education in general, a student’s first feature film is not going to come from subsidies like in Europe. It will also not come from a person a friend here likes to call “Mr. Moneybags;” a mythological, monopoly-man figure who appears at film festivals to offer student filmmakers a million dollars to make their first features.
As young filmmakers we will first have to prove our talents through inexpensive means of getting our stories on the screen. Film school is a place to start learning the discipline of filmmaking, and that includes budgeting. Even with a half-billion dollar budget money remains an issue. We might as well learn to deal control them while they’re in the thousands.
