| Generally agreed. You need to pay for people's time. That is 100% certain. (There can of course be exceptions with lots of volunteer time like Iron Sky.) Is equipment so expensive nowadays anymore? I don't think so. You can buy most with one month's median salary. You can use still cameras nowadays, as their sensors and processors have sped up and they've overtaken traditional cinema cameras of a few years back already. They work quite well even in natural light. (Especially if you use a hack and enable high bit rate encoding.) You can edit with a normal computer. There are led lights etc. Cranes and dollies can be much lighter, simpler and cheaper with this modern technology too. There's lots of possibilities of "lean" film making with this new technology. I presume the revolution would happen in documentaries first as the technologically adventurous people wouldn't generally be those who have grand visions or are good at organizing the other parts like scripts, talent, sets etc the whole "running a play" thing. Hell, there are character centric Dogma movies like Open Hearts that get rid of a lot of fancy technical stuff, and it never bothered me when watching them. Look at what guys like Philip Bloom or Andrew Reid make with ordinary cameras. The freedom is already there, people just don't know how to use it. |
iirc, they received ~$100k in cash and $250k in donated resources, equipment, etc. Yes, $350k is a good amount of money but compared to the production costs from a major studio, this is probably the catering budget.. and it's nothing for most of the VC's we read about around here.
(Disclosure: I was an extra and a buddy of mine was the producer.)