Tuesday, June 23, 2009

How long is a low budget movie?

I am immersed in writing the screenplay, so the blogging has been very slight over the last week. I'm also sneezing. Yes, it is the hay fever season.

A brief report on the screenplay:

Three acts are written. It comes out roughly 10 pages short. I still have two aspects of one sub-plot to work into it. These are connected with a character who is dead already by the beginning of the movie - developing her back-story and investigating her death. In my estimation, inserting this material will take the screenplay to my target length - of around 80 tightly worked pages, roughly 80 minutes of screen time.

Bearing in mind that each minute on screen costs money, and that this is to be a low budget movie, the intention is to make it as short as possible whilst still being long enough to be considered a feature film. My aim had been in the 77 to 83 minute range. Happily, we seem to be heading for the bulls eye.

Today, I am reading through from the start to the finish, editing as I go, identifying places where my insert scenes could work.

2 comments:

Paul Lamb said...

Have you ever read Being Dead by Jim Crace? His two main characters are already dead at the time of novel begins. Interesting tour de force kind of writing.

Rod Duncan said...

Hi Paul,

Not read it, no. Sounds interesting.

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