Four Missing Lines

Budgets don't fail on bad estimates. They fail on lines that were never there.

I've produced 25 independent feature films. Budgets don't usually fail because you priced something badly. They fail because a line wasn't on the page at all. Something you didn't know was a line item walks onto your production and hands you an invoice, and there's no box for it. Four films, four missing lines.

Line one · Anything Is PossiblePrep is a budget item

We had less than a week to prep a feature. I was prepping next week's shoot while shooting this week's. Every decision you don't make in prep, you make on set with a crew standing there, the most expensive room in the world to decide in. No prep means you're paying full crew rate to do pre-production. It cost us about 10% of the budget, and it came straight out of post.

Line two · Amelia 2.0The talent costs that aren't the talent

Flights, hotels, ground transportation, per diem, multiplied across six or seven people. Each one looks small, and that's the trap: they stack. I ended up about $25,000 over what I'd planned. Travel isn't logistics. It's a talent cost. Price the actor delivered to set and housed for the run, not the actor.

Line three · MamaThe insurance nobody warns you about

Errors and omissions insurance covers you if someone comes after your film for what's in it. You cannot deliver a film without it, to anyone. On a true-story documentary it ran about two and a half times what we'd budgeted, because a claim about a real person is a different risk than a claim about an invented one. If your film is about something that happened, call a broker before you shoot.

Line four · SolitaryOvertime is not an exception

We blew the SAG overtime, close to $20,000. Nearly every actor went into overtime on nearly every day. I treated overtime as an exception for a bad day. Overtime is your schedule telling you the truth. If your days are over-packed, you'll run long systematically. Budget it as a certainty, then attack the schedule so you don't need it.

The line underneath all four

Contingency. Every one of those problems was survivable if you could pay for the fix. Without it, you don't get to declare a crisis and stop. You pay for it out of post, a shooting day, or the color session. It doesn't kill your film. It quietly makes it worse. The contingency isn't the line you cut to make the budget work. It's the line that makes the budget true.

Do this with your budget this week

1. Find the four lines: prep, above-the-line travel, E&O, and overtime.
2. If any is missing or a round number you invented, it's not a budget yet. It's a wish with a spreadsheet around it.
3. Protect a real contingency. It's the last thing spent and the first thing defended.

Questions, answered

What budget lines do first-time producers forget?

Prep, above-the-line travel and accommodations, E&O insurance, and overtime, plus a real contingency.

Do you need E&O insurance for an indie film?

Yes. You can't deliver a film to a distributor, platform or most sales agents without it, and it costs more on true stories.

How much contingency should a film budget have?

The common instinct is around 10%. On a micro-budget film, Enrico argues for more, because there are fewer places to absorb a hit.