Raising the budget

Everyone has their own journey when it comes to making a film. I have been to loads of seminars about raising budgets. What I’ve found is that when you have expert panels it also means that you have a wide variety of ways people raised funds and there is never any definitive answer. My story is as unique as the rest.

In summer 2013 I found myself homeless. I don’t want you to give you the impression that I was Oliver Twist walking the streets of London. I was searching for a place for myself and my beautiful boxer dog and finding I was struggling to find anywhere. I spoke to a friend of mine and he kindly offered us a roof. Now this offer came with conditions. My friend was renovating his house. This meant that the house we moved into was essentially a building site. He had gutted the entire building. I’m talking about opening the front door and jumping into the foundations of the house. Walking across the ‘living room’ and climbing up into the kitchen (the only room with electricity). The condition of me living there was that I had to give him one day a week (which fell on a weekend) to help around the house.

If you factor in my full time job working Monday to Friday in Marketing and my new found rent free humble dwellings you’ll soon start to work out where my budget had come from.

I become a hermit. Focused solely on making this film. I wouldn’t spend any money. In fact I rarely had the time even if I did have the inclination. I was saving close to two thousand pounds on a monthly basis. Suddenly my dream of making a high end short film across four seasons wasn’t unrealistic anymore. Instead it was a reality.

The next step was working out how I was going to approach a short film that meant I had to wait several months in between scenes.