For those of you who are following me on here, thank you. For those of you who are not, I am in the middle of production for a movie I wrote. It is a musical that uses the music and ideas of Jonathan Coulton. I've been keeping a blog on here to track the progress of it all. I'm happy to say that after our first 16-hour day of filming, nobody has died. But who knows, we're still very early on in production. This blog will cover how we're dealing with having a very limited budget. 

So making movies is expensive. Who’da thunk it? Going into pre-production we knew we’d be forking over some amount of money to have this project see the light of day but the question was how we could finance it with little to no cash.The answer? Lots and lots of phone calls and favors being called in.

First off, the camera. We’re using a pretty expensive camera, the shell alone without any special features costs around $1,200. When you add on a 35mm lens and all the little doohickies that we wanted, you’re getting to around $2,000. That’s a ton of smackos. Luckily we had friends at the Art Institute in Pittsburgh who were willing to let us use their equipment on one condition: we advertise the $h!t out of them. No problem, I mean we’re getting an awesome camera right?

Secondly, the lights. Normally in a perfect world you’d be looking to spend a few grand on lights to make everything look pretty when viewed through the lens of the camera. Instead we went with a very simple route. When you attach china bulbs around some halogen lightbulbs, you get a very nice lighted-area effect. Cheap, efficient, and they aren’t throwing off an extra 15 degrees of heat on set. We bought about 5 of those and we were good to go.

Third, we are all working for free. Everybody on set is an actor who would normally get paid for their work. Whether they be union, or a union-candidate, nobody on set works for free unless there’s a good reason. Luckily we decided to do this just for the pure love of the source material and the fact that we really wanted to give the fans something out there they could call their own. The world of geekdom doesn’t really have a ton of musicals out there besides Dr. Horrible, although the Street Fighter High School musical looks reeeeeally cool. Instead of taking a paycheck, we’re throwing all of that money into food. If everyone donates 3 dollars a day, we can have lunch and dinner quite easily if we order pizza. Problem solved.

Well those are just three ways we’re saving money on the set of Code Monkey. There’s a few more that deal with our audio problems that I will probably save for another day (recording on set, dubbing, ADR, etc) cause that is a field all its own. Below is our 3 behind the scenes video that will show you how we’re using a wheelchair as our dolly. You know it is going to be a good project when you utilize handicapable transportation as film rigging.
 
 

Thanks for reading! 
~ Aaron J.