Filmmakers hide budgets like they are shameful. Here is ours, category by category, because someone hid theirs from me once and it cost me two years of guessing.
Camera and lenses: borrowed, insured, returned with a bottle of something decent. Sound: the one place we spent properly, because you can forgive a soft image and you cannot forgive a soft consonant. Travel and housing: the real budget. Food: the other real budget. Festival fees: more than the sound package, which should embarrass the industry more than it does.
The biggest cost was the year itself — the days off work, the favours called in, the patience of people who love us. No spreadsheet line holds that.
Why publish this in the Cutting Room? Because the platform's terms are public and uniform, and I think budgets should live in the same weather. You can see exactly how a film earns here — the pool, the memberships, the tickets — and I would rather my numbers be part of that same honesty.
Published in The Cutting Room by Ava Kestrel Films.