What is a Film Budget!
I suppose I should first tell you what in a generalized sense a budget is and why most people haven’t got a clue how to establish or read one – let alone commit to abiding by one. Yes, that’s right I used the word commit, because that’s what a budget is, it’s a commitment!
When you decide to research a budget you are about to do one of two things, either you are determining the fixed value of a quantified whole, by listing the component parts of that whole then assessing a value for each individual component and then totaling the list and accepting that the total is the true value of the whole. Or, you are stating a total amount of funds available for a given period of time then listing the individual debits (otherwise called commitments) already assumed to be necessarily required during that time-frame in question and then determining if the amount of funds available will yield a deficit or a surplus of funds.
This last description should sound quite familiar to you because it is what each of you ought to be utilizing each month to determine if you have enough money to live on for the next thirty days! By the way that part about people not having a clue how to establish or read a budget, well that’s true. The overwhelming majority of Americans have no budget for their own monthly expenses or income – they just make it and spend it, make it and spend it, then assume (or pray) it’ll all come out OK!
So it’s no wonder that ninety-five percent of all Americans are in debt when they die! Now that’s truly something to ponder. Only five percent of Americans die in the black, meaning with a surplus of cash!
Now let me put the original question, “what is a film budget” into perspective by describing to you the condition you are in when you are without one; you are blind, worse yet you are flying and blind, in motion, at a high rate of speed, completely unable to navigate and with no hope of avoiding total annihilation.”
Now let me describe the condition you are in as a filmmaker once you realize that the budget you previously believed to be an accurate reflection of your shooting script, a budget you thought would protect you once you were out in the real world, you know, shooting, is in fact no such thing at all, but rather an extravagant collection of numbers that have little or no relation to your script or your vision, not by way of camera movements, the words on the page, the actors dialogue or the schedule, in fact it has no relation to your project at all!
The condition I am describing, the condition you have found yourself in is one where you are completely, shall we say, screwed! Furthermore, you must now also contemplate the possibility or even probability that you may never work as a producer or line producer in this town again or any other town for that matter, because after all is said and done it is a very small world and you’ve just made a supremely colossal blunder!
These words sound harsh, yet they are quite true. The film budget is meant to provide clarity and insight, allowing for a visionary experience, proactive both by nature and by design, an activity that is a highly creative enterprise, one that calls for nuanced interpretations, subtle delineations and extremely precise spot-on assumptions. We refer to these assessments as assumptions because we are talking about predicting the future – a future where many powerful people have a lot of money at stake. Of course this is money that they have invested, but more importantly what is at stake is the money they stand to make.
A budget is, in simple terms, a direct translation from the written text of a film script into numerals that represent dollars. More specifically, when a budget is developed with honesty, integrity and political impartiality, it is a pure reflection of the creative work it is derived from. It is thereby, a true blueprint of what will be required to make the script manifest in the real world. It is the bridge between the writer’s vision and the director’s raw, uncut footage. It is, in a sense, arrived at by way of a series of refined assessments and projections, which when properly articulated, then expressed mathematically, will allow for each and every detail of the final script to be executed with maximum production value.
Budgets are assembled in numerous categories and sub-categories, all of which must be balanced and in ratio within each specific category as well as in ratio to the whole. Each and every script is unique and therefore each film budget, although having structural similarities to other budgets is also quite unique. Before you can pad a budget upwards or grind it down to a lesser amount you must first derive a translation that reflects the truth in contemporary terms.
Developing and then building a budget requires a great depth of prior experience in the production of filmed media, but this alone is not enough, it also requires a particular sense about the world, an ability to grasp abstract concepts, not the least of which is to assess how long it will take for a series of event to occur and how much it will cost to go from nothing to something.
In the hands of someone who is fluent in the language of film production, a budget is a topographical map, an engineering blueprint and a clear set of instructions all in one. Unfortunately, many budgets are either developed or more likely later revised by committee, with a political corporate agenda, in other words heavily influenced by non-creative people whose intentions (usually myopic) are highly suspect and whose input can effectively sabotage an otherwise successful production!
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