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How we made an epic film for less than $1000
 Posted Mar 7, 2007
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Posted on behalf of Avrel Seale.
In an era when a “low-budget” film is often considered to be something made for about $1 million, I think my friend Jay Galvan and I may have recalibrated things a bit. In 2005, we made a feature-length movie called The Secret of Suranesh for less than $1,000.
In the fall of 2004, Jay, who had decided to add video production to his marketing and web design business, told me he had just bought a new digital video camera that rendered video that looked like film. Having gotten a degree in radio-TV-film in the late eighties, I was well-versed in the difference between the look of video and the look of film, so I was skeptical, but not having been able to use that degree, I was largely ignorant of the huge advances that had occurred in the intervening 15 years. All the same, I was curious.
The next time we met, he brought his laptop and showed me five minutes’ worth of test footage he had shot in his backyard on his Canon XL2. I was in.
Over the next few months we toyed with what we might do with this new ability. At first we considered making a short, or a series of shorts. Then we thought about undertaking a documentary, the only option that seemed rational for two guys with virtually no budget.
But as we continued brainstorming we eventually talked each other into jumping off the deep-end with a full-length feature film. One thing remained the same, though: we had virtually no money.
Jay had some pictures in his head, as did I. Both of us saw a sort of lonely, post-apocalyptic world, which fit nicely with our budget for sets: $0. But futuristic apocalypses had become pretty cliché – I kept thinking of the Planet of the Apes, the Terminator, Mad Max, even the hilarious opening of Strange Brew, as the McKenzie Brothers, making their own movie, trudge along a jetties, and Rick Moranis says: “It’s fifty years after World War III hey...”
What had not been done, that I was aware of, was the portrayal of a post-apocalyptic world set in the past. This concept played right into a long-held interest of mine in lost civilizations, one influenced heavily by the writings of Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods, Underworld). (You can read more on the film’s story at www.Suranesh.com.)
As I got busy writing the script, Jay got busy investigating every setting on the camera, to see how far we could push it toward a film look – lots of talk of color saturation, grain, and how black could we get the blacks. That’s as technical as I get, but he can talk that talk all day long. Whatever he did, it worked, because the one comment we continually get on the film is how beautiful the scenery is.
Knowing that we were going to actually MAKE this movie informed every aspect of the script. No large armies. No exotic animals. In fact, the entire cast was six people, plus two others with brief non-speaking roles. No lavish costumes. Jay and I spent about $300 on leather and fabric and fashioned all the costumes ourselves, even recycling different pieces of cloth in different configurations for different characters. I did the makeup, even learning how to lay a crepe-wool beard. All of the props came either out of my garage or from Goodwill.
After we had settled on our premise, the chief concern while shooting became avoiding any and all signs of modernity. To accomplish this, we shot in city, county, state, and national parks, most within an hour’s drive of Austin. On one three-day weekend, site unseen except from snapshots on the Web, we took our lead character, “Suranesh,” a really good-natured and patient friend named Joe Fradella, and made the drive to West Texas to run him around Big Bend National Park and Monahans Sandhills State Park (3,000 acres of sand dunes that provided our archetypal desert). Those three days of shooting gave the film virtually all of its “epic” scale, because we interspersed those “traveling” shots between scenes of dialogue that were relatively tight. I think the effect worked pretty well. On another three-day weekend, we took Suranesh down to the Rio Grande Valley to shoot the last fourth of the movie in a tropical setting, including the coast.
In nearly every shot of the movie, some sign of modernity is JUST out of frame, be it a trash can on Boca Chica Beach, a handrail at Hamilton Pool, a fire hydrant in the middle of a creek, an oil rig just over the horizon of a Monahans dune, or the ubiquitous cigarette butts and jet trails. But I’ve watched every scene in the movie about 100 times now and haven’t seen any slip-ups on that front. The hard part in post production was getting the sound clean, as the microphone was picking up 18-wheelers and barking dogs a mile away when we didn’t even hear it on set.
All of the cast and crew were volunteer. Having all non-actors as actors did create a directing challenge, but we got by with a cue card system that worked pretty well in most cases, so that our friends did not have to memorize lines. Although it would have been better if they had memorized lines, it just wasn’t realistic in this case due to the fact that the movie is very dialogue-heavy, with some lines that border on soliloquys. And the crew was lean, to say the least. The standard config was Jay behind the camera, one person holding the boom mic, and me supervising the script and holding cue cards. It was a luxury when we had a fourth person, who could hold the bounce card to fill shadows, or help wrangle props or unruly costumes or hair, or just listen and watch for continuity.
Not only was it lean on set, but it was quick. Jay and I both have full-time jobs and young children, so we had to optimize our time away from home. Plus, all of our talent was volunteer and we didn’t want to take advantage of our friends’ time and good will. So one element that was crucial to our success was knowing what we wanted, sticking to the script, being organized, and not fooling around a lot on set. We had to get out there, get the shot, and get back home to the wife, kids, and job, We did relatively few retakes, and we wound up using just about every shot we got. Not much margin for error.
We shot the movie in 12 days over the course of five weeks. About six months after principal photography, we realized we needed some more B-roll, so we took a day trip down to a Renaissance festival, where we shot a lot of quirky, non-identifiable footage that we were able to roll in. We also shot footage on my uncle’s horse ranch, and found a skyscraper in downtown Houston the top of which resembles a Mayan temple. No need to build a model – we just shot it from the ground, cropping it above the air conditioning units. (We did have to clone out the little red blinking air-traffic control light on top.) Low-budget filmmaking is like a scavenger hunt. If your script calls for something, you just keep your eyes open until you see it. Since it was almost all shot in nature, we took what we got. If it was cloudy on a particular day, it was cloudy in the movie. If it was a spectacular sunset, we got a spectacular sunset. Again, little to no margin for retakes. In that sense, it felt a little like God had a hand in the look of the film. The weather was what it was, but time and again, we got exactly what we needed. The sun would break through right when we needed it, the clouds, when we needed them.
Editing took about six months, and was all Jay’s laptop, with Final Cut Pro software. If we had had 40 hours a week to devote to it, we probably could have knocked it out in about a month, but we did it by hook or crook, collaborating over dozens of lunch hours and the occasional all-nighter to get it done.
The last major piece, the music, which is equally important as the cinematography in giving it an epic feel, happened by sheer accident of birth. It just so happens that my father, Carl Seale, is a lifelong composer in the symphonic idiom that the film needed, and, since the 1990s, has become accomplished in digital orchestration. He composed the soundtrack and recorded all of the orchestration, basically just for fun. (He also acted in the movie.) So I highly recommend having extremely talented family members when you’re making an epic for no money.
All in all, I think we pulled it off. We spent 2006 entering it in film festivals to no avail. But we took it straight to DVD in late 2006, through on-demand fulfillment (Customflix.com, cross-listed on Amazon.com) and viewer reaction has been heartwarming. We’ve sold copies in 19 states, plus Canada, the U.K., Germany, New Zealand, and South Africa. One viewer has listed it in her top-10 movies of all time. Can’t ask for much more than that!
And we did it all for less than $1,000, most of which was gasoline and breakfast tacos for our cast and crew. (If you’re starting with absolutely nothing, the camera, computer, and software probably would run about $5,000, maybe less today.)
It’s been an adventure, and hopefully won’t be our last. I’ve got another low-budget, but slightly more ambitious, script in development.
You can see the trailer, read more about the movie, or order it at www.Suranesh.com.
Thanks!
Avrel Seale,
Co-producer, co-director, writer: The Secret of Suranesh
Austin, Texas
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