Pre-production: Budget

Budget

For our project 'Rewerked' we all contributed £500 at the beginning of production, this would be to cover food, travel, accommodation, kit and any other unexpected expenses. This money would then be put into a bank account that I had access to and could track the progress online and via a spread sheet to ensure that money was being spent correctly. Your film’s budget isn’t aspirational. It should encompass everything you will actually spend on the film, not what you hope to spend. With this in mind, envision each step along the way and the coinciding costs. Initially, with the goal of spending as little as possible (10 Lessons Learned While Making My First Short Film Budget)

Some major factors that can affect the cost of a documentary are;

Shooting costs

Shooting can incur many hidden costs including, kit, crew, locations, talent and any graphics you want in the doc. For our shoot the kit we need to pay for 2 cameras and that's is due to our DOP already the rest of the kit he wants. Our crew is all students and instead of being paid a wage their travel would be covered, any location that needed to be paid for would be negotiated to keep things as low as they possibly can be. Our talent will not be getting paid and they are all aware of this, instead their travel and food will be paid for like the crew. 
Any graphics done would be done by students so again would not be getting paid for. Because of this we have saved a lot of money compared to what would have been spent. After sitting down with Gavin the DOP and discussing the kit he would have liked we came to a conclusion that we were both happy with, where we got cheap cameras that would give the image quality he needed. do you HAVE to have original underwater footage that you capture in far-off waters, or can you get by with licensing some stunning underwater footage from a stock house? (How to create an accurate documentary budget)

Distribution and marketing

After spending a bunch of money to make your film, it deserves to have strong marketing materials to go with it. A good website, postcards, a well-designed poster will cost money (not necessarily a lot) but they will help you create a cohesive visual identity for your film, making it more accessible to festival programmer and eventually an audience. (10 Lessons Learned While Making My First Short Film Budget)

Instead of paying for our marketing I got in contact with someone I know who does graphic design to make our poster, we went to Tanya and took photos and then briefed the person on what we wanted.

For social media I created a facebook page and instagram that allows us to share our project with a lot of other people

Format

For help with how to format the budget I looked into examples and found this one from Sundance:

The format for our budget is on 2 different spread sheets one with the estimated cost in it and the other with the actual cost of things so I can see if we were staying on track with what we should be spending. This is what we had.

Actual costs so far look like this:

I then had a meeting with Helen to ask her for help on anything I'm either missing or anything where I'm spending money on something I shouldn't be. She noted that we shouldn't be spending as much on accommodation and travel where we could be saving with car rides instead of trains. She also suggested I give a lot more money for food.

This is the final version of the budget that also includes Graphics, Props and Music, even though we're not anticipating any money being spent on them they're included incase any unexpected costs arise.

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What I learnt from doing the budget is the importance of having contingency money incase anything costs more than it does. I've learnt the importance of having it in as simple of a format as I possibly could so that everyone can understand and see where the money is going. I've also learnt the need to compromise with members of crew on certain things, for example if Gavin wanted another camera or Jemma wanted a location we couldn't afford or get for free, I'd have to sit down with them and work out a way where we can still get good footage for a cheap price.