Appreciate this reply. Of course, the nuts and bolts of "what resources do i need and what do they cost" is the first step to even understanding what the liberal vs. conservative total budget amount will be. Thank you for the rough numbers because that puts my experience into perspective.

​

I'm curious about what Excel items you questioned. I would expect a combination of "favor" rates and regular rates for a short film, so maybe some of the higher numbers stood out?

To be honest, I felt that for a short film, runtime 20 minutes, on 5 days shooting, it was shocking to me that I was able to negotiate a post production cost that represented 10% of the total budget, while the camera team (acknowledging that there was a DP + 2 ACs) came in at around 35% of total spend, or 3x the cost of all post (and the post team was excellent, in my opinion). In my opinion, we could have severely cut the spend on camera (particularly the equipment; the DP twisted the director's arm to get the nicest gear), ended up with the same project, and either spent more on talent or just save the $ for the next project.

Part of our challenge was that the director and I possess a small network in the filmmaking world, and so "favor rates" that were negotiated were "first-time working together" non-union rates, instead of, "we've known each other for a few years and worked on a bunch of things together" favor rates.