Your No Budget Screenplay,No Money is Good

Your No Budget Screenplay, No Money is Good

    For the short term having no money to produce a big budget epic is a good thing.  If you had an unlimited budget to work with and access to all the actors and locations on this world and how ever many others that could be computer generated then you would not have to learn the basics and you could happily go off and produce your version of  Dune.
    If that is your goal then you do not need any help or advice, go forth and create your epic piece of what ever Dune was.  Do not get me wrong Dune is an entertaining film, but it is in that accidental kind of way.  Sort of like a Three Stooges kind of car wreck.  The sad thing is that we can not say that for 99 percent of the mega budget flops that hit theaters each year.  These movies are usually written and produced by those who never bothered to learn the basics.
    Are you familiar with the films Batman the Dark Knight and Inception? 
    Christopher Nolan did both films. Wrote, produced and directed.  This is a man who learned the basics while making low to no budget films. 
    Most people think that Nolan’s first film was Momento.  It is a film with a million dollar budget and that was not where this great writer/filmmaker began.  He started with a movie titled Following.  It was a 6,000 dollar little movie that he wrote and shot on weekends for almost a year.  It is the hard work and lessons learned while writing this screenplay is what helped to make him someone capable of creating a film as unique and massive as Inception over a decade later.

    When you have to be inventive to solve problems rather than throwing money at the problem you will actually be learning the fundamentals that will help you years down the road to create epics.
    Do not look at having to limit your locations, the scope and number of characters as a handicap.  These are the lessons that will make you a better writer.
    Keep in the back of your mind while doing the first draft the number of locations that you are using and the population of your screenplay.  Remind yourself that locations cost money and that actors cost money.  What about extras they work for free?  Hey in the ultra low budget world your stars will most likely work for little to no money, but they have to be fed.  Extras have to eat.  Even if it is pizza and pop tarts they have to be fed.  Food cost money, so extras cost money. 
    If you have a script that requires a cast of less than ten people then that cast can most likely be held together by the producer and or director for many weeks or months if the weekend way of shooting is required.

    Keep these things in mind and try to write something every day.  Even if you are just writing notes.

Your Screenplay, Four Corners

    Your Screenplay, Four Corners


          Here is a little advice I picked up from a well known Japanese director.  When asked how he writes a script he would say that he would start with a story board in the shape of a comic script.  Four corners to tell the whole story.  He would draw the 4 most important images in the whole movie
and then write toward those visual moments.  Take some of the greatest
movies of all time and see if you can come up with four shots that tell the whole story. 
    Next about the most important character.  The Antagonist.
    Yeah, you heard me right.
    Heroes are the characters that we love. They are our babies and we treat them
as such, but it is the villain who drives the tension of the story.  The antagonist is the
one that makes drama possible.
    The great Bond movies all had great villains .  The bad guys made Sean Connery
number one.  He had villains who were fun to be around and to watch get it in the
end. Treat them, while they are on the page, as if they were the stars of the story.
Also following a comic book rule here is not the worst thing you could do.  The
hero is usually the mirror opposite of the villain.
    The villain is strong where the hero is weak.  In superman his arch-enemy is the
smartest man on earth.  If your hero is made of water your villain should be made of
fire.  Keep this in mind.  And now some advice from the last action hero.  The
bigger the obstacle the bigger the hero must be.  I like Woody Allen, but he has
never fought aliens and saved the world because no one not even himself
would believe it.
    Also try to keep your characters, both good and bad guys, on their feet.  Tie
their shoes tight and make sure that they do not stumble and fall in moments
of crisis.  In Friday the 13th the girl always falls while running from Jason. 
In too many action film the hero is saved by the villain stumbling and falling
at the moment they are about to win.  Only in comedy should you have
characters flopping like Ric Flair in a title match.
    Let me  leave you with this.  If you want to learn more about writing scripts
read them.  Read your favorite movies, they are mostly free on line.  If you
want a master’s class on the subject read Hitchcock’s The Birds, or North by
North West or Psycho.  He did not do the actual writing on these scripts, the
director influenced every one of them and the attention to detail in these
scripts is why Hitchcock is considered the greatest of all time.