The $1000 Film

Zuckerman says: "What you have matters more than what you lack (If you’ve got a bicycle, consider what you can build based on that, rather than worrying about not having a car, a truck, a metal shop.)"

I think a lot of the time we as people are far more interested in what we cannot do than what we can do. When I was getting my Master's Degree, I decided that in addtion to every other demand on my time, I was going to shoot a television pilot. There were numerous problems, of course, the chief of which was that I had next to nothing when I started and the average television pilot costs over $300,000 to shoot.

It became pretty apparent very quickly that I was about $300,000 short of $300,000, so it would be best to concentrate on what I DID have at hand if I was going to make this a reality. And I did have some things. I had access to free equipment from the department. I had access to free labor from my fellow students. I had the enthusiastic participation of actors and actresses from the university theater department who wanted experience. I had the fact that I was a student, because when you ask for something for free, a lot of the time people in everyday life are a lot more willing to help you if you are one.

In short, I had a lot of things... things that might monetarily be worth nothing, but things that demonstrated that I was probably a lot closer to '$300,000' than I initially gave myself credit for. It is really all about perception.

You determine what you want. Then you determine the resources you have at hand that will help you reach what it is that you want. There was no way, for example, for us to reasonably obtain microphone shields that would muffle and nullify the constant New Mexico wind rumble, so through trial and error, we built our own. We did not have an expert sound tech, so we learned how to utilize the filters in Sound Forge in post-production.

These are all very specific things that apply only to the problem I was individually facing, but they are examples of how the outlying principles can be applied to this specific problem. I and my crew set out to start a $300,000 project and spent a total of about $1000 altogether and in 2005, our project won the Eastern New Mexico Film Festival.

It can be done... as long as you have the ability to recognize exactly what it is that you have and don't spend much time worrying about what it is that you don't have.