Download these Free Film Budget Templates to help you create your own Film Making Budget easily. To explore more choices, check out our post on Business Budget Templates.
The term Film Budgeting is a process of estimation and allocation of expenses to produce a film or shoot a movie. The preparation of the budget for a movie starts when the screenwriter creates an idea or story for the film. After reviewing the story, the director, producer, and other staff members decide on the names of the actors. Moreover, it also includes location, type, along with the shooting of the movie. This way, Film Producer can estimate every little expense to produce this movie.
The key purpose of film budgeting is to evaluate and estimate expenses to produce a particular film. It helps to find ways to cut back on some expenses. This way they can understand whether to make a limited-budget movie or not. With the allocation of finances, it’s very easy for the financial officer to keep the entire filmmaking team on track to complete the film while staying within the defined budget.
What Happens if one Exceeds the Film Budget?
The key purpose of preparing a budget plan for a film is to make estimates of cost. This is to make sure that the production team doesn’t exceed the defined budget. But it is quite common that the team will need more money than in the budget plan. This is because there are too many components of a film budget. For example, the budget for shooting abroad may be kept to $5 million. But by the time it’s the actual time to travel to an international location. The airline charges are gone up so the production in charge has to spend more than what was decided on the traveling.
Essential Elements of a Film Budget:
There are many elements of a budget for a film, but most of the time; these elements depend on the type and size of the film. The most common elements include the purchase of story rights for the film, screenwriter expenses, paying the producers, paying the director, paying the cast i.e. actors and actresses, paying the production costs, paying for the music of the film, making payments for visual effects in the movie and the payment for the editor in post-production of the movie.
Useful Tips for cutting costs in a Film Budget:
If you are preparing a budget for a film and you observe that the film might cost more than what you have in your hands, you can cut back on specific areas that have the flexibility of being done with a lesser or fewer budget. For example, you can eliminate night shooting and save a huge amount of money for your film because night shooting costs more than daytime shooting. Another tip is that you should avoid using a famous or commercial location for filming the movie because it will cost you less if you make the film in a location not used as a commercial property. In the same way, you can save a lot of money by using the traffic or road in the shooting early in the day when there are fewer vehicles on the road.
Free Film Budget Templates
Download the Free Film Budget Template that can easily help you prepare your Film Budget effectively.
