Like with so many dreams, I only half remember making my latest short, “The Perfect Place to Cry”. It went by so fast that it felt less like a film production, and more like a midnight romp through the woods.

In late June of 2022, an image came to me while I was lying awake in bed around 4 a.m.: a man staggering out of the dark forest, into the headlight beams of a car. A little odd, a little dark. The perfect spark of inspiration for a short film. I jumped out of bed and started to write. It took me about fifteen minutes to finish the two-page screenplay. The next morning, I showed it to my roommates (and closest collaborators), Celina Bernstein and Matt Kleppner. The three of us have been working together since college, and at this point they are the first readers for everything I write. They immediately clicked with the story, and we started brainstorming how to bring my insomniatic fever dream to life.

Writer/Director Shane Bannon talks with Actor Jesse Howland while Actor Kevin Owyang gets into character - Photo by Celina Bernstein

Celina joined the film as our Producer and Lead Actor, and Matt came on as the Director of Photography. They were my first and only choices for those roles. But there was a catch: Celina was going to be out of the country for all of August, and Matt was set to start his second year at AFI right after that. This meant that if we wanted to make “The Perfect Place to Cry”, it had to happen fast. We quickly pulled together the rest of our crew, and prepped to shoot three weeks later, over one short summer night. Everything came together so fast that I didn’t have time to question or expand on the initial two pages. I just tried to hold onto that fleeting sense of dream logic. And, despite the typical stress involved in putting together a production, the whole process somehow felt easy.

Everybody knows that making a film takes time, money, and more than a little logistical Tetris. Some of my own projects have seen post-production stretch on for years. With all the work that a production entails, it can be easy to lose sight of your initial vision for a project. Budgets, actors, and locations can change on a dime. Your favorite ideas for a story can slam head on into the hard immovable wall of reality.

But sometimes, you get lucky. Sometimes, you write a script in one night, throw together a production team on a whim, and shoot it as fast as you can. Without enough time to second guess ourselves, we had to rely on our intuition. 

It’s a great feeling, having everything go right. In filmmaking, people often say that everything that can go wrong will go wrong. But in my experience, if you know what you want, if you trust your collaborators, and if you take pleasure in the bumps that come up along the way, a whole lot of luck can find its way to you. 

Left to right: Matt Kleppner (Cinematographer), Mon Castro (Line Producer), Celina Bernstein (Actor/Producer), Shane Bannon (Writer/Director), Sofie Somoroff (1st Assistant Director)

Production itself was its own logistical puzzle. As a filmmaker, I’m a bit of a minimalist. I try to shoot for the edit, getting only the coverage I need for each moment. But this time, the stakes were higher than ever: we had one night to shoot “The Perfect Place to Cry”, and in mid-July, that’s only nine hours of darkness. There was no time in our shooting schedule for shots that might not work. Knowing this, a week before the shoot, I summoned Celina, Matt, and Sofie Somoroff, our 1st AD, to shoot a video storyboard of the entire film on the dirt road behind our house in Los Angeles. Editing together this footage provided a test run for the story we were trying to tell. In the end, we only filmed one shot that didn’t make it into the final cut of the short. Everything else was just as we had planned it.

My favorite moment of the shoot perfectly encapsulated what it felt like to make “The Perfect Place to Cry”. While most of the crew began packing up for the night, Celina, Matt, and I piled into our picture car to capture the opening shot of the movie: an interior of the car driving along a dirt road. I felt giddy, sleep deprived, and incredibly grateful for my friends and collaborators that came out to make the film happen. The sun was just about to come up, and in our haphazard rush to get that last shot in, I felt all the excitement of the process that had gotten me into making films in the first place. We might as well have been high schoolers shooting some no-budget horror movie on a camcorder. It’s moments like these that make filmmaking worth it. When you surround yourself with the right people, they just might make your dreams come true.

"A Perfect Place to Cry" is available to watch now on Alter.

Main photo: Celina Bernstein in a still from “The Perfect Place to Cry” - Shot by Matt Kleppner

“Dad, I wanna make a movie with you.” 

Nothing in the world will get the creative juices flowing more than hearing these words from your 14-year-old daughter. Mine is named Scout. 

“So, specifically, what does that mean?” I asked her. “Do you wanna write? Act? Direct?”

“Yes.” 

Movies have been part of our family from the beginning. My wife Brooke and I met in an acting class years ago. We got married and continued to pursue our dreams, but then kids came along, and priorities shifted. Cut to seven years ago, as we realized we still had those same dreams. So we made a low-budget film together called Quality Problems. Brooke wrote. We both directed. Our friends Jen Prince, Jhennifer Webberley and Colette Freedman produced. And we cast ourselves and our kids as the leads. 

We had a successful crowdfunding campaign through Seed&Spark, and boom — we were off to the races. We won awards. Got into tons of festivals. Got distribution. It was awesome.

Then it stopped. It was over. And nothing truly remarkable happened as a result of our efforts. 

And we realized: We’ve got to do it again. That’s the high. The end you’re going after. The “doing.” And so we did. 

The first challenge we saw was that crowdfunding is not a well you can keep going back to. Your friends and family are happy to help out on one project. Maybe two. But after a while, it gets old. And everybody is asking for money. So we realized we needed a new model. One that isn’t dependent on cash and big favors. 

Time to cowboy up. 

The first thing we had to do was find a story. Scout and I would brainstorm for a while, getting nowhere. Every time we thought we had something, we realized it had been done. But we just kept at it. 

One day, as Scout was looking at her screensaver image of a beautiful mountain range, she said, “That should be a movie.” And suddenly we had it. 

Writing Pilgrim

Our logline: When an overachieving teenager hikes the Pacific Coastal Trail in order to connect with her dead mother, she is suddenly forced to address her dysfunctional relationship with her man-child father.  

We banged out a rough outline for what would become Pilgrim and quickly moved on to the script itself. We would take turns: She’d write a scene or two after school. Then I’d come home from work and bang one out. It basically became an improv where we kept yes and-ing each other. Truly painless. We had a script in two or three months. We watched a ton of movies to prepare, including a lot of Ed Burns’ work, specifically 2011’s Newlyweds. He got that in the can for $9,000, and it revived his career. Another odd source of inspiration was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Tobe Hooper said that the movie was a shot from a flare gun he sent out from Texas. He didn’t let financial constraints keep him from making a now-classic film.

Next up was the daunting task of figuring out how we were going to pay for our film. Obviously, crowdfunding came up. Sure, we could go that route, and we’d probably raise a decent amount, since it had been a while. But I really wanted to do something different. What if we truly tried to shoot this thing for next to nothing? Almost as an experiment? Sure, it would be a challenge, and we would have to be very creative. We went back and forth on it, and eventually I won her over. And this led us to really develop our own style, both aesthetically and in our model of filmmaking. See, when you don’t have anything, you are beholden to no one. You can create your own rules. You can be fearless. You are in complete control. 

And, oddly enough, without that fear of failure, you make bolder choices.

To spend the least amount of money possible, we purposely only used locations we could get for free, or almost for free. Colette is a playwright, script doctor and ghost writer who teaches screenwriting at Antioch University, and our best get was from one of her Antioch MFA students — she has had a Big Bear Lake property in her family since 1914. It was relatively close to Burbank, where we live, and has eight cabins and several acres of surrounding land. We shot half of the film there, using most of the cabins, as well as the mountains, woods, hiking paths and the lake. It was magical. Our biggest expense was food — feeding the cast three meals a day — and paying actors’ gas money to get up the mountain. 

Filming Pilgrim

It took us approximately two months to shoot the entire film piecemeal. We spent a week in Big Bear, shooting seven to 10 pages of Pilgrim a day. But to avoid the harsh midday sun, we shot from 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. and from 7 p.m. to midnight. We each did the work of three people every day. 

In terms of gear, we kept it simple. In the year leading up to the shoot, Brooke and I had directed shorts, and my son Max had done a bunch on his own. So we already had a good camera. We used a Sony a7iii that we shot in 4k with a custom Cine 4 profile. (I know everyone says to shoot in log format, which allows you to capture and retain more information from the camera’s sensor, which allows you more options in post.

Since we were moving so fast, I wanted to have something I liked and trusted in the monitor. But if i were to do it again, I’d shoot in log. Max has turned me on to it). We used one lens, a Tamron 28-70 zoom, because we didn’t want to slow down to switch lenses. We also used a cheap neutral-density filter — a must since we were doing so many daytime exteriors.

Also Read: Razzies Apologize to 12-Year-Old Nominee, Set New Age Limits

For sound we used Rode lavs, which worked amazingly. People are shocked that we got the sound we did on these cheap little lavs. We also used a Zoom H1 as a boom/backup mic, but we barely used the audio from it, since the lavs were so good. We did have a couple days where the lavs ran out of juice, so we threw on a Rode shotgun mic. I was terrified to hear that footage when we dumped it into the computer, but you couldn’t tell the difference. It sounded great.

We had a Neewer LED lighting package, and it works great — but honestly we used practicals with adjustable temperature light bulbs for the vast majority of shooting. And by far the best source of light we used was fire. The campfire and fireplace scenes are probably the most beautifully lit scenes in the film.

We started off planning to shoot Pilgrim with a mix of sticks and handheld and gimbal shots in a specific order to signify the journey of Scout’s character, but we realized early on that we just loved the handheld look. The sticks shots started showing the lack of money, and made things really slow. But once we put the camera on a borrowed Revo shoulder mount, the scenes really came to life. We got a vérité/doc look reminiscent of Friday Night Lights. And we could move so fast. Max would hide the camera in a big jacket, and we’d steal shots everywhere: grocery stores, train stations, trains — you name it. You just can’t do that with a camera that’s locked down.

Our cast and crew were basically one and the same. Scout and I wrote and directed. Colette produced, acted and did whatever else was necessary to keep Scout and I from being spread too thin. Brooke, Max and I shot everything with our friend Riley Dismore, and we all acted as well. Scout also ran camera by the end of the shoot. Our editor, Tom Flynn, acted also. But no one seemed to mind. We were all learning as we went. It was just fun. 

The Pilgrim cast was around 20 people, and we had about 30 locations. Everyone says to keep your cast and locations to a minimum. But we were able to move quickly and discreetly. We shot one scene in a diner, and were in and out in 45 minutes, with full coverage and B roll. (The waitress got a big tip.) We shot at a graduation ceremony, a farmers market, and a library — but hardly anybody could tell what we were doing, because we left such a small footprint. 

Pilgrim Lessons

Luckily, the new SAG-AFTRA Micro-Budget Project Agreement allows union actors to work in projects shot under $20,000. Colette and I are both SAG actors, as are Ryan Bollman and Jenica Bergere, who were both in Quality Problems. The new agreement is a game changer and allows us to work with actors we love. 

Film has historically been a very expensive medium with a high barrier to entry. But that’s changing. The tech is getting so good that you can just go out and do it. I’d love to do this like a repertory company where we can be in post on one film and in pre-production on another. It’s possible at very low budgets like ours. As of this writing, the film is in post production, and we’re looking forward to entering festivals in search of distribution.

Shooting films the way we shot Pilgrim means that we aren’t waiting around for someone to let us make a movie, and I plan to keep growing with this model. Sure, if someone came to us and said, “Here’s a bunch of money!,” I’d gladly take it. And it would certainly make selling the thing a whole lot easier. But in the meantime, isn’t it just about creating stories?

Main image: Doug Purdy and Scout Purdy on the set of Pilgrim. Photo by Colette Freedman.

Adams’ deeply personal storytelling propelled the film to a stellar festival run that included American Meltdown winning Best Feature at the Chattanooga Film Festival, where it premiered, as well as Best Screenplay at FilmQuest, and multiple performance awards for lead actors Jacki Von Preysing and Nicolette Sweeney. It was acquired by Quiver Distribution and released in November.

Below, Adams and the crew explain how they made a micro-budget feature that punches well above its weight class in terms of production value, acting, story, and style.—M.M.

THE MONEY

Andrew Adams: The budget for American Meltdown was $75,000. Losing a dream job came with one silver lining: I qualified for a $35,000 low-interest Economic Injury Disaster Loan. Then, when my late and beloved grandfather heard my plans, he mailed me a $5,000 check. The remaining funds came from personal savings and credit cards, spread across four years of spending.  Our goal then became to make $75,000 look and feel like $1,000,000.

Andrew Crabtree (producer): One of the most important things in budgeting for a true DIY indie is to remember: the budget will only ever go up. It’s as sure as death and taxes. If you only have $100k, and you build a project with $100k in mind… You will need $170,000. Suddenly you’re way out over your skis and you’re already halfway down the mountain. So we built our target budget for $40,000, knowing we could stretch personal funds up to $75,000 when those inevitable extra costs kicked in. And they did kick in.

Andrew Adams: We spent roughly $20,000 on production (crafty, costumes, props, camera and lighting, insurance, permits), $17,000 on locations, $23,000 on cast and crew fees, and $15,000 in post.

CAST & CREW

Andrew Crabtree: The single most important element of a DIY indie is the people. This movie looks and sounds as great as it does not because of expensive and fancy equipment, but because of our wildly talented cinematographer (Mark Evans), field audio mixer (Josh Atwell), editor (Josh Cole), make-up artist (Mercedez Gonzalez), on-set producer (Stewart Cory), co-producers (Crystal Collins and Coraline Kong) and many more. Similarly, the movie is fun and engaging because of the talent of the cast. These are things that you can’t, realistically, put a price on. 

Andrew Adams: Cast and crew with intention. And hire friends. Actors Jacki Von Preysing, Shaun Boylan, and DeMorge Brown had been close creative collaborators for years, and scene-stealer Clayton Farris was a friend of Drew’s. Shared histories created a sense of trust that was essential to get through the hardest moments of production. We all knew that we had each other’s backs and were making something rad. 

Also Read: In American Meltdown, Andrew Adams Channels a Generation's Sense of Being Robbed

Andrew Crabtree: Everybody has to understand what movie you’re making. The very first conversation we had with any new hire was to explain openly and honestly what kind of movie this was. We didn’t have the resources or the luxuries that other, larger shoots have, and we didn’t want to pretend to be bigger than our boots. We needed folks who understood the assignment. Making a DIY indie is not for everyone, and that’s okay! But our cast and crew understood from the jump what they were getting into and we were blessed with a team that relished the challenge, saddled up, and worked together to make the very best film we could.

Andrew Adams: I rehearsed with the cast on Zoom during Covid lockdowns, allowing plenty of room for improv, then rewrote the script to incorporate the actors’ ideas. Clayton became more villainous, Nicolette more grounded. We wove this collaborative and improvisational spirit into the script early, so we could arrive on set with a tight screenplay that was ready to shoot. 

CAMERA

Mark Evans (cinematographer): It’s really easy to make a movie look this good on a dime if you’re willing to make a deal with the devil to give away your firstborn’s immortal soul. In all honesty, much of the film’s visual success stems from the locations, which were very carefully chosen. Time of day and location of the sun were far more important than any of the actual gear we had on the show, and pre-planning our shooting windows to the position of the sun helped us stretch the look of the movie beyond our very limited means.

Andrew Adams: We didn’t have an art department, so I scouted for months to find locations that were already beautiful. Then we let the world do the work. We shot in December so that the sun would hang lower in the sky all day, natural backlights and bounces would be easier to achieve, and we could shoot (generally) from 11 a.m. to midnight and get plenty of dark night scenes without forcing our crew to work overnight.

Mark Evans: We also had to reconcile lighting styles we wanted with the realities of what we could afford. I had only a young French film student to help me grip and gaff the entire feature, Ivan de Crécy, and I will be forever in his debt not just for his incredible work ethic but also for his willingness to embrace the challenges of a DIY feature. 

I chose lights that could be rigged with only two people, didn’t need generators or tow plants, and could run on battery power if need be. The Astera Titan tube and Nyx Bulb Edison kits reigned supreme. I wrapped almost all the tubes in control grids and cheap white pool noodles (sourced on Amazon) to soften and disperse the source, then hid them all over the place. The largest units we had were two Mole LED 1600w Tener Fresnels, some of the first of their kind (which made them very cheap to rent). They were absolute beasts and truly devastating to move around, but effective nonetheless. They were daylight balanced only, so we were constantly wrapping the units in colored gels to get into the desired palette for our night work. The camera was an old, discounted Alexa SXT.

Andrew Adams: Mark and I agreed, early on, that a polished studio look best suited the story. Which was a challenge, given that we had no extra hands to help “polish” the look and only a fraction of a studio’s resources.

Mark Evans: That decision probably took five years off my life. 

Andrew Adams: Mark also introduced me to Matt Workman’s Cine Tracer software, which we used to pre-visualize every single frame of the movie.

Mark Evans: Cine Tracer was instrumental. After scouting our locations, I virtually reconstructed each of our sets in the program. We could place virtual cameras alongside posable “actor” models, allowing us to walk through blocking and action for every scene. 

When you’re making an indie like this, having nitty-gritty conversations about camera placement, intention, and design in advance is a life saver. It created a blueprint that Andrew and I were able to rely on (though we often threw it out) and gave us confidence on set. I can’t emphasize enough how much that saved our bacon. When you’re strapped for resources and up against the wall with a schedule like we had, having the difficult conversations in advance will get you through.

EDITING AMERICAN MELTDOWN

The post-production team came down to essentially four people: editor Joshua Cole, co-editor Jon Falk, sound designer/mixer Alex Britten, and colorist Billy Hobson. 

Josh Cole (editor): Can we talk about how editorial was so low-budget that it was funded with burritos?

Andrew Crabtree: 100% yes, without irony. 

Andrew Adams: The No. 1 rule of low-budget filmmaking is that a well-fed crew is a happy crew. 

Josh Cole: We found it was important to watch cuts of the film in rooms of people, because you begin to see the film completely differently than in the suite. You often finish a screening already knowing what needs to be changed — even before getting feedback. 

Because this movie is a tricky blend of comedy, drama, and crime, the main note we got was about tone. Much of the tonal balance was established in the first act of the film, and so our first ten minutes required more experimentation and editing than any other section of the movie. At first our opening was too long and slow, so we streamlined to the barest essentials — only to discover that we had lost too much and audiences stopped connecting with our lead. This required finesse.

Our earliest cuts embraced a comedic tone. We left in every joke that got a laugh, only to find that they undercut the drama later on. Our next cuts embraced drama. We cut out every joke we could, and discovered that the story got more emotionally compelling… but less fun to watch. Which required a third stage: balance. We swapped jokes and music cues in and out until we knew which broke the reality and which sustained it. Finding the right pace and tone required a lot of time, experimentation, discussion, and a willingness to kill the darlings. 

Plus burritos.

MUSIC

Andrew Adams: I once worked on a lush and cinematic horror film where a full 25% of the budget went to the art department, and it helped me understand that a filmmaker’s budgeting choices can define their voice and style. I’m obsessed with music and knew it was a department where I wanted zero compromises, so I promised to spend whatever it took to get the score right. 

We sought out the best composer possible and landed on rising star Jason Martin Castillo after hitting it off over coffee. I requested a dark and funky score that fused Marvin Gaye with Jonny Greenwood. Jason proceeded to compose music that sounded like a five-piece funk band live-scoring the film. The result is an anxious, percussive, and beautiful suite of songs.

COLOR

Andrew Adams: Billy Hobson is a world-class colorist at Harbor Picture Company, with credits like The Peanut Butter Falcon, New Life and Los Frikis. He agreed to work on our film based not on the budget, but on some good times he had years ago while working at a camera house with our cinematographer. The lesson being: be nice to everyone. The friendships you make when you’re 22 can move mountains down the line. We communicated our vision to Billy by sharing a PDF of reference images for each scene and look. He embraced dark shadows, filmic grain, and a sense of naturalistic imperfection.

VFX

Andrew Adams: Everybody who read the script in prep had one question: “How the hell are you gonna burn down a house?” It was vital for a climactic and thematically key arson sequence. The short answer is that we hired an amazing VFX artist named Jared Potter. But if he’s unavailable for your next project… here’s the long answer.

Before ever writing the fire scene, I studied VFX stock footage libraries like ActionVFX for pre-existing elements that I could craft a scene around. After noting some particularly strong “window flame” assets for sale, I reverse-engineered plot details to center the action around a window. As Mark and I designed shots, we’d constantly cross-reference ActionVFX to ensure that matching flame elements already existed.

On set, we filmed wide plate shots of the house (without setting it on fire, believe it or not) in a variety of lighting conditions, utilizing flickering Astera tubes to emulate flame or bright flashes of hot white light for explosions. Then digital flames were added in post. 

For close-ups, Mark and I drove out into the desert, dumped all our remaining props in front of a 2x4 painted to match the house walls, popped some beers, and lit that shit up. 

But the real flame in our close-ups failed to match the digital flame in our wide shots. It was… obvious. So Jared did some miracle work. He pulled color information out of our close-ups and used it to make the digital flames in the wides more accurate. Then he mixed both real and digital flames into individual frames, tricking the eyes and blurring the boundaries. Now our real fire close-ups include digital flame, sparks, and smoke as foreground elements. 

CONCLUSION

Andrew Crabtree: One through-line that pops up in every element is planning. Or, in many cases, reverse-engineering. We knew we weren’t going to have the budget we wanted, so we had to be smart about what we could realistically put on screen.

Almost all of this was done by Andrew in the writing stage: setting scenes in locations where we could shoot for free (outdoors and in public spaces, for example). Writing roles catered to certain actors we already knew and loved. Crafting a third act built specifically around VFX assets we knew we could get our hands on. This kind of forward thinking was paramount in allowing us to pull this all off.

Andrew Adams: The shoot was tough, but the hardest part has been getting people to watch. Though they tend to love it when they do. So please, by all means — check out American Meltdown!

Learn more at geni.us/americanmeltdown.

Main image: American Meltdown. Quiver Distribution.

Those were the words I said to my wife (girlfriend at the time), Xenia Leblanc.

It was during the pandemic and it had been close to 11 months since I was let go from my job. We spent our time making short films and projects at home by ourselves. 

We’d entered online contests and even won some, but as things started to wind down and people started getting vaccinated, the itch to do something a bit more ambitious began to taunt me. 

With that, a small germ of an idea began to form in my mind — something bold and ridiculous. 

I wanted to shoot a blockbuster-level action-movie car chase, but I had no access to  blockbuster-level budgets. 

So what does the woman you love say when you tell her you want to film a blockbuster-level movie, and you’re both collecting unemployment? 

“Okay. Write the script.” 

That was the start of our little adventure.

Writing 'The Pickup'

I knew I wanted to shoot a car chase, but without the story, it’s just a bunch of fast-moving  cars with no destination.  

I started with the first image that came to mind — a badass female spy walking away in slow motion from a departing helicopter — already extremely ambitious, and that’s just the first sentence. Eventually, I stumbled upon the idea of an Uber driver picking her up, and that’s when it all came together. 

Soon we had our logline: When a bumbling Uber driver unwittingly picks up a government spy who needs to deliver a top-secret package, he finds himself in the driver’s seat of a high-stakes game of cat and mouse while navigating the city streets.  

SUPER ambitious, I know, but having a background in VFX, editing, and cinematography gave me confidence I could pull it off. Not to mention, I’d shot a small car-chase sequence before,  so I knew what I was capable of. But that was just a small scene with one straight road. This film would involve city streets, tunnels, and a top-secret command center. 

Still, I didn’t want to limit myself. So, I wrote what I felt we could do with what little resources  we had, and as soon as we had a finished script, we were off to the races. (Pun intended) 

Prepping 'The Pickup'

With the pandemic still going on, our cast and crew pool was pretty limited. So Xenia and I decided to keep it to close friends we knew were comfortable with shooting.  

I always envisioned Xenia for the lead role of Alpha, not just because she was available, but also because she is a talented and well-accomplished actress who has been in shows and movies like Orange Is the New Black, Black Widow and The Boys. To co-star alongside her, we called our friend Adam McArthur (Disney’s Star vs. The Forces of Evil and Jujutsu Kaisen), who’s really funny, so we knew we were in good hands with the comedy. 

The rest of the cast was filled with friends who we’d worked with before and were down to not only act, but also crew the film. That’s usually what you get when you have a small budget. You don’t have the luxury of spending tons of money to hire a huge team, so you tend to have your MAIN BAD GUY also double as a grip or stunt car driver, and to sometimes be all three. 

Also Read: How Vera Drew Made The People's Joker With Her Own Money — and No Budget

To better prepare us, before principal photography even began, Xenia, Adam, and I shot a rehearsal in my parked car with an iPhone, capturing all the rough actions and angles we liked  in our motionless vehicle. 

I edited them together with a bunch of shots from epic car chase sequences from big Hollywood blockbusters like Bad Boys II, Six Underground and Need for Speed.  

Thanks to this animatic (video storyboard), by the time we started shooting, we already had most of the film figured out in the edit and knew exactly what we needed to capture.

Filming 'The Pickup'

Our first two days of filming were the biggest in terms of crew, stunts, and locations. The rest mainly consisted of pickup shots and inserts. We were shooting in the streets and tunnels of  Downtown L.A. with no permits, so all our pre-planning came in handy. 

Shooting primarily on the Blackmagic Pocket 4K, using Sirui Anamorphic Prime lenses, we chose to keep the camera system small, compact, and lightweight. Our other cameras included the Panasonic Lumix GH5, GoPro Hero 9, and a DJI drone.  

We used a cheap car mount occasionally, but to help add some energy, we mainly relied on filming handheld while hanging out the car window or trunk. It sounds unsafe, but our assistant director Preston Daniel Grant, who’s into mountain climbing, ensured I was always properly strapped in. It also helped that the roads were fairly empty at the time, so we rarely had to deal with oncoming traffic. 

Following the rules of the road, we never exceeded the speed limits and instead filmed at lower frame rates to make the cars seem faster. The LAPD even assisted us in a couple of scenes for  absolutely free! I still can’t explain how that happened, but bless the movie gods.

Editing 'The Pickup'

Shooting took longer than expected due to schedules, weather delays, and my proposal to Xenia, so I did most of the editing and VFX simultaneously. To save money, I did about 98% of the shots myself, though the last shot was by my talented friend Nick Shaheen. 

For the car crashes, we relied less on CG and more on miniature die-cast toys. Xenia and I would film the models at high frame rates in similar lighting conditions as our pre-recorded background plates, wrapping them with fishing wire so they could roll down our makeshift road propped up on a table. 

Afterward, I’d spend hours painstakingly rotoscoping, tracking, and compositing them into the background plate, adding layers of glass, dust, and spark elements to blend it all together.  Even the aforementioned helicopter shot was just a toy on strings.

After nearly a year of work and a few extra miles on my car, we finally finished. What was supposed to take roughly five days over two months ended up taking 12 shooting days over nine months. So much had changed since we started. I got my job back, we’re married, and our film has grabbed quite a bit of attention in the industry.  

The Pickup recently premiered at the Dances With Films festival and has been seen by some big-time filmmakers. The breakdowns of some of the shots I’ve posted online have garnered millions of views on Instagram and TikTok. 

My goal has always been to democratize blockbuster filmmaking. I want to prove that anyone can make a film that can rival a Marvel movie in its scope and action. You don’t need millions of dollars to make a good film. You just need a vision and  dedication.  

It also helps if you have an awesome partner. 

Nicholas Acosta, Xenia LeBlanc and “The Pickup” are on Instagram at @unrenderedmedia, @xenialeblanc, and @ThePickupMovie. Step-by-step videos are on the YouTube channel @unrenderedmedia.

Main image: Xenia LeBlanc in a very expensive looking shot in “The Pickup.” All photos courtesy of Nicholas Acosta and "The Pickup."

“I never had a budget,” laughs Drew, the film’s director, co-writer, editor, producer and star. “I never really had a roadmap. I would never make a movie like this again, and I don't advise anybody else to make a movie the way I made it.”

The film, now available on video on demand and Blu-Ray, sprang from the discourse over Todd Phillips’ 2019 Joker, which reimagined both Batman’s greatest nemesis and the Martin Scorsese classics Taxi Driver and the King of Comedy. Phillips said in an interview he had moved on from comedies like Old School and The Hangover in part because it’s hard “to be funny nowadays with this woke culture.”  

Drew was known at that time for her editing for Tim & Eric, Eric André, Sacha Baron Cohen and other comedy icons. Her writer friend Bri LeRose, taking issue with Phillips’ assessment of the state of comedy, sent Drew $12 over Venmo to commission a comedic re-edit of Phillips’ Joker. But soon Drew soon got serious, and realized she wanted to make a “real movie.” She reached out to LeRose to see if she would co-write, and The People’s Joker was born.

Many wise experts at breaking into the industry advise screenwriters to write something very affordable to shoot. Drew and LeRose didn’t do that.

“As far as micro-budget film scripts go, this was like the most ambitious script ever written,” Drew laughs. “We did not know how we were going to pull off anything we were writing.”

The two imagined a lurid, vibrant, gorgeous twist on the Gotham City of Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher’s Batman films, stacked with characters that even films with multimillion-dollar budgets have sometimes struggled to carry convincingly from comics pages to cinema screens. It is both a queer coming-of-age story and a knowing, alternately harsh and affectionate critique of comedy institutions from the Upright Citizens Brigade to Saturday Night Live.

Among those who praise the film is The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody, who has called it “the best superhero movie I’ve ever seen—because, unlike studio-produced films in the genre, it responds to the filmmaker’s deep personal concerns.”

You’ve perhaps heard about what happened when the film premiered last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival: It played just once because Drew received a letter from Warner Bros. representatives concerned about the use of their characters.

The resulting headlines led to film-festival circuit fascination, but Drew thinks it may have also scared off some distributors. After several semi-secret festival screenings, The People’s Joker rolled out for a theatrical run in cities across the United States this spring, distributed by Altered Innocence. Drew had worked closely with her lawyers to make sure the film was legally protected as a parody. 

We talked with Vera Drew about making The People’s Joker with more than $100,000 to spend — but no budget.

Tim Molloy: This movie is beautiful. May I ask what it cost? 

Vera Drew: It's tough to say because the process was so organic. … In 2020, during the pandemic, it was like, OK, I can't work. So I'll get a PPP loan so that I can stay self-employed, and maybe pick up some freelance gigs. And while I'm doing that, I'll work on this movie and kind of just pay myself.

But then that ran out and I reached the point where I was like, OK, now we need to film it. And I wanted it to look good, because I knew every shot was going to be on a blue screen. So it needed to be lit, and I needed to shoot it on a soundstage. So I tried to crowdfunded it.

We raised just shy of $25,000, and it was crazy because I think my goal was $10,000. But I'm glad I raised that amount. Because all of that went into our shoot, pretty much every single dime. Which was cool, because it looks great. And it was lit well, and we got everything we needed. We shot it in five days. 

Tim Molloy: If you’d told me it cost $200,000, or $2.5 million, I would have believed you.

Vera Drew: Thank you. I mean, we definitely ended up spending a lot more, because after we wrapped, I had surgery and so kind of had a downtime. I opened up my computer and it finally settled in: Oh, now I’ve got to edit it. And I had this whole team of artists that wanted to work with me on it. A lot of them had already started working with me on it, coming up with revisions and sets and stuff. I knew I needed a lot more money to finish this. 

I never wanted people to work on it for free, because the movie was so much about how exploitative and shitty show business can be. I didn't want the behind the scenes of it to embody that in any way. 

So I did what they tell you never to do, and I took out a huge loan. I went about $100,000 in debt. Not all of that went into the movie — a lot of that went into taking time off so that I could oversee this big, unwieldy, sort of VFX nightmare that I created for myself. But I used that reserve of money to pull from to pay the artists as much as I could. 

And again, I didn't really have a roadmap. It was really like going through and figuring out, What do we need for each of these moments? What can I pay people? Because everybody that worked on it was underpaid. If I’d had $2 million to make it, everybody would have probably gotten appropriately paid, but even then it might have been cutting it very close, just because of the amount of work that went into just the blue-screen removal. 

Vera Drew on Offering Creative Freedom to Her People's Joker Collaborators

Tim Molloy: There's also such a thing as barter, where you have all these creative people doing something for you and you're presumably giving something back, besides money.

Vera Drew: Well, that's the thing. I’ve worked for a lot of people and at a lot of places where you'd get told, “We're all family here,” which is such an empty gesture. A lot of people who want to make films end up hearing these things. If your boss is ever telling you that, run for the hills, because all that means is you're gonna get underpaid. And you might even get told you're gonna get experience out of it or whatever. And that so rarely happens. 

I wanted to apply this different approach to it, where it's almost like a community garden or a community art project or something where there's a collectivist approach to it. I always knew that my voice and my face would be in almost every shot of the movie, so I was never worried about my vision disappearing in it. So I would go to these artists, and say, “Look, here's what I can afford to pay you. If you don't want to do it, please don't. I want you to feel compensated financially, but more than that, artistically.” 

That meant not micromanaging what the artists were bringing to the table, and allowing the artists to lean into their best aesthetics. For example, we have a broken-down amusement park set that was just a 2D abstract painting of a broken-down amusement park by artist A.T. Pratt. I didn’t know how to use it as a set, but thought, let's figure out a way to make it work. So my 3D animators cut out individual pieces of it, and turned it into a 3D diorama set. And it’s amazing.

Adaptations of Pratt’s painting into the 3D environment used for the film, by Jasperi Wirtanen and Scott Lougheed

That was just the approach of working with what people wanted to bring to the table and allowing them to really explore their best aesthetics. That’s why the Batcave in the movie looks like an old PlayStation. Salem Hughes, the artist who made that set and our Batmobile, makes that kind of 3D model. So it was like, that's perfect — let's make all those sequences look like a Batman video game or something from the ‘90s. I think it helps the movie feel so eclectic, and queer.

Tim Molloy: I've always wondered: Why can't someone just make a movie and give shares to everyone who works on it. And then if the movie hits it big — and of course most movies don't — you can pay them a percentage. 

Vera Drew: Yeah, you absolutely can. And we had a level of that in place, to a certain extent. Like my line producer on the movie, Joey Lyons, was making almost no money on this. So that was a person where I was like, “Hey, you get points on the movie.” And when I was able to get finishing funds via my distribution partners, we said, let's go back and pay Joey more, let's go back and get our character artists paid, let's license the songs we want to use.

But I think with this one, it was a little tricky just because from the legal standpoint, I didn't want to implicate anybody either, financially. But your point stands. I think more indie filmmakers could make really ambitious projects, if they approached it from a DIY community. Sort of like a co-op. 

Main image: Joker the Harlequin and Mx Mxyzptlk (Vera Drew and Ember Knight in The People's Joker. Altered Innocence.

This story initally appeared in the summer 2024 issue of MovieMaker, on newsstands now.

But for all that planning, the Canadian production suffered wild ups and downs no one could have anticipated, and a terrible tragedy.

Skinamarink tells the story of young siblings Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), who wake up one morning to find their father (Ross Paul) is missing. The only light in the house comes from their TV, because the home’s doors and windows have mysteriously vanished as well. For 100 minutes, they wait for their dad to show up, or the lights to come on. Time passes in strange ways. It’s a child’s nightmare. 

Real-life tragedy came to the film when assistant director Josh Bookhalter died just after filming was complete. He also ran sound for the shoot, and the audio files were still on his computer at the time of his death. Ball took time away from the project to grieve his friend. Then, in time, he reached out to Bookhalter’s family to retrieve the audio files. They agreed the film should be completed in his memory.

Last summer, during its festival run, Skinamarink leaked online, appearing in TikTok clips that received over 20 million views. It was obviously not the ideal way for the movie to be seen, but it became a marketing blessing in disguise. Shudder decided to release the film in theaters this past January after it became an underground sensation, and soon viewers who didn’t see it in theaters could stream it on Shudder at home. 

Ball says the experience of almost losing Skinamarink, several times, and then watching it become a box office hit, left him feeling like “Carrie at the prom, but, in a good way… before the blood.” 

The Rules of Skinamarink

He said the film’s survival, and ultimate success, came down to two principles. No. 1 is simple: Be graceful.

“A lot of filmmakers gave me bad advice, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but just be nice, try to be human, try to be empathetic,” Ball says. “Being an asshole when you’re first starting out will do us zero favors in the long run. You’ll regret being an asshole.” 

Principle No. 2: Create a set of rules for the shoot. 

“The rules that I created would make the movie different, would deliver the atmosphere I wanted, and also would keep us under budget. The rules are: We never see the character’s faces and their dialogue is delivered off screen. We would only use one location and only see the four characters,” says Ball. “We don’t see the outside and there’s no sunlight coming in before the windows and doors disappear. There’s no musical soundtrack, so any music will be incidental stuff coming off the television.”

Ball shot Skinamarink in his childhood home, which eliminated location fees. Another advantage: Director of photography Jamie McRae worked at a local film and video co-up, and used a treasure trove of personal rental credit on the production. 

“We were able to rent a ton of gear for zero dollars,” says Ball. “If that had been another production and they received the member rates, the rental costs would have been $5,000 to $10,000. So I did have a lot in my favor to make a fairly cheap little shoot.”

Skinamarink Budget Breakdown

Most of his production expenses — about 15,000 Canadian dollars, or roughly $10,000 — went to paying Skinamarink’s team. Bookhalter and McRae were each paid a flat fee of $2,000. The director wished it could have been higher, “but it’s the most anyone was paid because Josh and Jamie were on the shoot the entire time and had to do a lot in pre-production,” he says.

Ball took a $1,000 director’s fee, which he used to buy a computer to edit the movie. “Before that, I was using this dinky, $500 business laptop to edit videos and it was on its last legs,” he says.

Under Ball’s plan, he only needed glimpses of the characters and never showed their faces, so each actor only worked one day of the entire shoot. They all received $150 each, including the child actors, who only worked a half day.

Ross Paul, who plays Kevin and Kaylee’s dad, received an extra $100 for gas because he had a two-hour drive from Red Deer to the shoot in Edmonton, Alberta. Jamie Hill, who plays the children’s mother, received $150 for filming one-third of a day. The remaining budget paid for props, gas, craft services. 

“Oh, and fake blood,” says Ball.

Skinamarink is now streaming on Shudder, from IFC Films.

Main image: Skinamarink mastermind Kyle Edward Bell, courtesy of IFC Films.

When Chrissy decamps New York for a promising relationship in Philadelphia, Judy is adrift, trying to figure out what kind of artist and person to be. It’s a film that drops you into its characters’ lives with no exposition, like an episode of The Wire about drag queens, and you soon find yourself rooting hard for Judy to win. 

Flaherty started writing screenplays when he was a New York actor who, he says, “could not get work.” When he did, it was often as an understudy for a straight actor playing a gay role. (As a gay actor with a strong sense of irony, his reaction was a mix of bewilderment and amusement.) He now lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Chrissy Judy premiered to a rapturous response in June. It is now playing in theaters and is available on demand this Tuesday. 

In the piece below, he explains how he made Chrissy Judy with help from his cinematographer brother, Brendan Flaherty, who shoots the film in a majestic style reminiscent of Gordon Willis’ work on Manhattan. — M.M.

When MovieMaker asked me to write about filming a rom-com on a budget of $20,000, I thought about how much privilege one really needs to make a film. I spent most of my twenties and early thirties struggling to pay rent and bills, and when I set out to make Chrissy Judy, I really had no idea how it was going to happen, but I pushed ahead knowing I would make the film by whatever means necessary.

Todd Flaherty on the Origins of Chrissy Judy

With the help of some interested parties, in 2019, I went out to L.A. from New York, found a producer, and was set to make the film for about $150,000. That was more money than I could fathom having, and even at that point I had people asking, “Oh my God, how are you going to pull this off?”  I wondered that too. 

Then the pandemic hit and our main investor decided to pull out. Despite that crushing news, my newfound creative team and I tried to forge ahead, until finally we realized: Oh, this is serious. The world is shutting down. We're not filming the movie this summer. 

Timing is everything. I was at peace with putting the project on hold, but determined to make it happen by the following summer. An opportunity presented itself for me to relocate to Provincetown, so I did. My brother, Brendan works on Saturday Night Live, which consumes much of his life, but that summer, things had slowed down.

Story continues after our podcast interview with Todd Flaherty, available on Apple, wherever you get your podcasts, or right here on Spotify:

While in Provincetown, two other investors on Chrissy Judy told me to keep their portion of the funds and do something creative with it. “Make art!” they told me. So I called Brendan, knowing he had some free time, told him about a short film I had written, and by the end of August we made this beautiful little film with a crew comprised of myself, Brendan, and his lovely wife Isabele as our sound mixer (she learned how to operate the boom and Zoom recorder on the ride up to P-town from New York).

With myself acting as the lead, and another actor, we took $3,000 and made a little 12-minute film in two days that looked like it had a huge budget. It ran the festival circuit in 2021 and audiences really responded to the writing, acting, and stunning cinematography.

Also Read: Chrissy Judy Is a Gay Drag Platonic Love Story for Everyone — and One of the Year’s Best Films

Making the short satisfied an urge to create, but by the fall of 2020, I was stressed again, trying to find money to make Chrissy Judy. Brendan had seen the ups and downs of my career for over a decade and read many drafts of the script over the course of three years.

He knew what I was after: a chance to show people the type of work I wanted to create and tell a queer story I had never before seen on film. He wanted to help me get there. Inspired by the work we did on our short film, one day he called me very excited. “You know what?” he said. “Let's just fucking do it. Let's figure out how to make this movie.”

I thought, We made something incredible with our short, maybe we could do it with a feature? I had some money saved up, and we had a few investors who came in, but what really set us up for success was the new SAG Micro-Budget Project Agreement, allowing filmmakers to work with union actors on any project shot under $20,000.

It seemed like the perfect benchmark — challenging, but not impossible. And most importantly, we could hire the actors we’d been wanting to work with — Wyatt Fenner, Joey Taranto, James Tison, and Nicole Spiezio to name a few.

Todd Flaherty on How to Make a Movie for $20K

I just want to be clear: Making a feature film for $20,000 with as many locations as we shot in (New York City, Fire Island, Philadelphia, New Jersey and Provincetown) was exhausting. As the director and lead actor, it would have been great to hire a producer and assistant director to make the days run more efficiently.

Not to mention, my brother literally did the work of seven people on set every day. He was incredible! Major cost savings came by using his Sony S7iii and just TWO lenses that he already happened to own for the entire film. Additionally, we had no lighting kit. Pretty much everything that you see is all natural light, or lighting that came with our locations.

We bought a gimbal, a boom and two lav mics, and Isabele came on once again as our “self-taught” sound mixer. It was a family affair.

The script was originally 103 pages. Before we started production, I said, Okay, well, here are all of the things we're just not going to be able to shoot with our money. And so we ended up whittling it down to about 85 pages. And I kept saying: “Okay — show, not tell. Show, not tell. What’s essential here?” And production started to feel doable.

Despite all of the film’s settings, it turned into this really simple story, the heart of which is just about a person who is trying to figure out who he is without his best friend by his side. And that journey of discovering yourself in solitude, despite needing that external validation from friends and lovers, was a universal story that made it easier to find other people to get on board with favors, free locations, anything to help keep us on budget. I like to joke that we made this film with scotch tape and a lot of love. 

I also took on the tedious task of editing the film, which saved us thousands in post production costs. Let me tell you, editing a film you wrote, directed and starred in is a very humbling experience! Like any filmmaker, I had moments watching different cuts thinking, “Oh, this moment could have landed better.”

Or, “I wish we had one more take here. Or a better closeup there.” But I have to look at it as a whole and say, my God, we made this for $20,000 in 16 days over the course of two months…That's insane! We were able to pull it off with so many limitations and I'm really proud of it. 

Overcoming Obstacles

As I said before, I had no idea how this was going to come together, so if you’re a young filmmaker (in experience, not age, per se) the main thing to do is to create forward momentum. Make what you can with the resources at hand. People always come to me with ideas for a film and I say, “Write it!” They come with a script asking the best way to get started.

I say, “Film a small chunk. See what you can do with nothing first.” Inevitably, your early work will not be as good as you want it to be, but if you keep making films, they do get better. 

I’m thinking again of the privilege it takes to make a film. The truth is, you have to create your own privilege and opportunities by thinking creatively…always. When you set out to make a feature film, when you lay the groundwork and start telling people what you’re doing, they will want to join. Most people are willing to jump on a moving train that has momentum.

One morning on set at a theater in New Jersey, we lost our location for the evening’s shoot, but that didn’t halt production. We needed to film two very pivotal scenes that morning, so that was at the forefront of my focus.

Once we concluded those shoots, on the car ride back to New York, we called every single person in our contact lists and, as luck had it, we got a new location that turned out to be even more ideal and cinematic than the original location. It wasn’t what I had initially pictured as right for the story, but by thinking creatively, we made it work.

And we got the location as a favor from someone who heard what we were doing and just wanted to be a part of it. I could have just said, “Let’s cancel the shoot and try to pick it up later.” But if you forge ahead, trusting your vision, the creative mind and spirit will open doors. 

After filming wrapped, some friends asked, “If someone sees a cut and approaches you with the original $150,000 you wanted, would you reshoot it?” And the truthful answer is, no. Not only because that never happens, but also because, in reality, we would have made the same movie.

Sure, more people would have been involved to lighten the load here and there, and maybe some of the shots would have been technically cleaner, but the beauty of working on something so small was that the artistic integrity of the film and my vision for it wasn’t clouded by dozens of other people on set. It was a really special experience and one I’m incredibly grateful for.

Ultimately the story I wrote just needed to be told and I would have figured out how to do that with any size budget. If you’re like me and you have a story in your heart you want to share, you’ll figure it out too. Look at the resources you have and start there, the rest will reveal itself. I never imagined the response we’d get to Chrissy Judy.

We’re finding a bigger and bigger audience each day and by the end of last year, we’d played on four continents around the world. It’s mind-blowing. And the most exciting part of all, now that we managed to accomplish such an incredible feat, is that everyone wants to know: “What’s next?” 

Chrissy Judy is now in theaters and available on video on demand.

Main image: Todd Flaherty