BUDGET

My dad made the good point that since people had enough faith to donate their dollars, it would be a good idea to share the budget breakdown. If you're anything like me you might have wondered something like: SIX THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED?! What in the heck for?? Here is a breakdown of our funds so that- as my dad put it- you can rest assured we didn't spend 3 grand on the film and the rest on a big party.

Our grand total raised on Kickstarter was $7,100. This was perfect because Kickstarter, and their affiliate Amazon, keep roughly a combined 8% in various fees, putting us at the amount that we had originally hoped for. ,P. Our final budget breakdown looks roughly like this:

Camera/Lighting Gear Rental: $1,500. This included our steadicam, shoulder mount, our camera body, 4 lenses, and that truck of other filming goodies you may have seen a few posts ago. It came to a total of about $70,000 worth of insured gear.

Grip Truck Rental: $200. We have to lug all that stuff around somehow...

Crew: $1,700. This money was for all of the people behind the scenes. Our 5-day paid crew included our Gaffer, who works right next to the Director of Photography to achieve the desired lighting, our Key Grip who sets up the lights, Best Boy who works hands on assisting lighting set-up (and million other tasks, thanks Kyle!) a sound mixer and boom operator, two make-up artists.

Production Design/Props: $190. This paid for things like printing posters for the hospital and support group, thematic elements we needed to add on set, and props for the actors.

Insurance/Permitting: $233. This is so we can safely film, and have ourselves and our gear covered if anything happens.

Food: $440. To film all of this on schedule means long hours-- easily 10 a day. The SAG-AFTRA union,-and our own sense of responsibility!- requires a certain amount of meals according to hours worked, and available water and snacks. This amount covered 5 days, three of them included two meal times. This came to 7 full meals for our cast and crew of between 7 and 18 people depending on the day, and snacks for keeping healthy energy all day.

Transportation and Stipends: $785. This covered stipends for actors, and gas; two of our locations were an hour out of LA, and gas was covered for this amount of driving.

Post-Production: $1,000. Editing and sound mixing! My favorite part. It truly flows and sounds like a film, and I couldn't be happier. This part of post-production was the last step before uploading the final version to Withoutabox for festival submission, and to a private link on Vimeo for our backers.

This is a total of about $6,000, which leaves $500 for festival submission fees, and for sending DVDs to our backers within that incentives bracket. Festival fees range anywhere from $40- $150, and we have our eyes set on many. Now comes the game of picking which are best for us in order to reach a large audience, generate the kind of exposure and awareness we are trying to cultivate, and get discussion started! Off we go. I'll update for every festival we submit to from now on.