I often get asked by film makers if I could tell them how to raise money for their shortfilm. In order to save myself from typing the same answers time and again I decided to write down what I know about financing a shortfilm in Finland. This turned out to be quite a long post, so I’ll divide it into two parts.
1.) You need a script and a breakdown. It all starts with the script. Your story tells you what happens on screen, what you will need to model, draw, animate, colour, edit etc. To be able to answer the coming questions you need to know how much work it will take to realize your script.
There are lots of books teaching you how to do script breakdowns, but for a director working on a fairly compact film you can start with a rule of thumb: Try to calculate man hours or weeks.
For a CGI production, you count the number of characters, props and locations and then estimate, based on your experience, how many hours or days or weeks it would take one person to model, rig and texturise them. Then you either make a rough animatic from your storyboard or just go through the script while imagining the final film in your head, stop-watch in hand. This should give you an estimate on the running time of your production. Judging from previous projects you can now estimate how long it will take for you and/or your crew to animate everything. Be as precise as you can and try to factor in crows scenes etc. Then repeat this for SFX, rendering, editing and so forth.
If you do not know the answer to one of these questions, ask around. Like I’ve written earlier, as a producer (and you are a producer when you finance your own production) you don’t need to know everything yourself. You can also have a look at my list of things that affect an animated project’s budget. Finally let the breakdown sit for a day or two, then go back to the calculation and raise most of your man hour estimates 10-50%, as everyone tends to be too optimistic when budgeting. If possible, run the breakdown by a colleague to get a second opinion.
2.) Prepare a budget. “How much do you need?” This is the question that everyone will ask you when you try to finance your film. Now that you’ve done a complete breakdown of the work involved you can calculate a proper budget.
Start with multiplying your workload from the breakdown with a wage multiplier. Don’t worry about how many people you need at this point, that’s why you calculated man hours in the breakdown. On smaller projects you might just use one wage category for everyone, on larger ones you can check the Finnish cinema & TV worker’s union for their tariff’s. Remember that if you are doing the project through a company (more on that in part II) you need to calculate side costs and holiday pay in Finland, which can be up to 38% on top of the wage.
Film budgets are always heaviest in the wages section, so congratulate yourself for working more than half way through! The rest is estimating what you will be needing in equipment (computers, software licenses, cameras, lighting etc) as well as materials (puppet parts, scenery, etc) and other costs (telephone bill, tape transfers, etc). Here you can make educated guesses or ask around. A budget template helps not only in calculating your costs but also in being a checklist for stuff you really do not want to forget. A good one can be found on the forms page of the Finnish Film Foundation (FFF), both in Finnish and English.
Armed with your script and your budget you can now approach financiers. Books discussing live-action shorts or Hollywood filmmaking will urge you to attach known actors to your package to raise your chances, but when making animated shorts in Finland you can save your energy here. Do a good breakdown and you’ll get far.
Next week I’ll discuss where you can go to find your film some financing.
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