Low Budget

As a newbie to screenwriting with no complete screenplays under my belt, I realise it is advantageous to produce a low budget screenplay. This is for two reasons:

(a) I don’t have the ear and personal phone number of all the people who matter in Hollywood (or anywhere else in the world for that matter), so if I keep the required budget as low as possible I don’t shoot myself in the foot by making my screenplay unattractive to low budget companies.

(b) Hey I might come into a little money and go to film school. If I am going to make the thing myself I don’t want to break the bank. The lower the budget, the better.

To me, making my screenplay low budget means producing a screenplay that won’t need big expensive sets, guns and explosions, or fancy CGI (although that can be done on the cheap).

What I have come up with that will hopefully turn out to be low budget is 3500 Miles from New York. What I’ve gone for is a screenplay that moves along the story with people talking rather fancy effects. This presents me with the ultimate newbie challenge: I have to be able to write good dialogue as I won’t be moving the story along with car chases and gunfights.

I have about 15 to 20 pages so far (once my handwritten pages are typed up), and the hardest part has been in a few key scenes with some lengthy dialogue. The challenge there being keeping the dialogue relevant to the story, rather than dialogue for the sake of dialogue. I think I have pulled it off but that is always for someone else to judge.

Anyway that is long enough for one post. When I’m happy with the start of 3500 Miles, I will post it somewhere for comment.