Customer Reviews

Film Budgeting: Or How Much Will It Cost to Shoot Your Movie?

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If you're looking to produce a very low-budget, extremely independent movie this book is not for you. If you are a completely green producer, this book is helpful in the sense that it gives you the page design of all the important budget forms at a much cheaper price than purchasing Movie Magic. However, the primary example in this book is a Coppola film, "The Conversation," which had a budget much higher than one could afford just with personal investments. Thus, a lot of adjusting math figures is necessary for you to get what you need out of it. What's more, this book is in desperate need of a new edition: this was printed in 1996, and a lot has changed in terms of technology and film "norms." For example, this book says the average mileage reimbursement is 28 cents per mile, which I'm sure was true in 96, but now, nine years later, the average acceptable payment is 40 cents per mile from a studio and 32 from an individual (ie low budget indie). Cell phones are not even mentioned once in this book. It's also a hard read because it's hard to get past the sophomoric spelling mistakes and typographical errors. These are small, insignificant details that just appalled me: I can't take advice from someone who doesn't know the proper use of "your" or "you're." Overall this book is just frustrating. I'm sure he is a fantastic force in the film industry, but the execution of this book made it seem like he just doesn't care; it feels like an afterthought.

I used this book in the recent shooting of a feature film, and found it and the separately-available workbooks very helpful. The workbooks use examples from an actual film budget ("The Conversation"); the text is clear, compelling, accurate and up-to-date. Best of the "how to" film production books I have seen and used.

Author Ralph Singleton knows his stuff. He is not a "wannabe" producer (check out his credits on the IMDb!). Do what I did--take the complete 'do-it-yourself course' with the Scheduling book, Workbook and Forms book. Computer budgeting software is great -- but this book actually teaches you HOW to budget -- not just put numbers in columns.

This book has been around for a long time, but it is still the definitive work on film budgeting. Whether you're working on a $50,000 indie or a $20,000,000 feature, this book lays out in detailed yet readable form the proper steps to accurately forecasting the budget of your feature. One of the most powerful aspects of this budgeting system, which makes it the industry standard, is that a full line budget gives you an individual line code for every single expense. This makes tracking your expenditures significantly less complicated.

You should be aware that this book is part two of a pair. The first part, 'Film Scheduling' shows you how to break down your script to get a shooting board, daily call sheets and the all important "actors' day out of days" - you need these calculations to feed into the budget.