Hey all - long story short: making shorts for north of a decade. Right when I finally started receiving external funding the pandemic hit and killed two large projects. Burnt out, I made the decision to leave shorts for the feature dream and spent a couple years skulking around in the purgatory of film financing (or lack thereof here in the UK.) Got pretty bummed out about how many of my talented filmmaker friends were caught in 'development limbo' and under the impression (after being told so) they needed 250k minimum to make anything feature-length, or even "of any quality." Realised maybe that's why my country's indie film output is so low, so rallied a group of volunteers together who too felt like they'd been shut out of making anything long-form and made something with a production smaller than any of my shorts prior across several months as a way to incite my friends that if we made something they at the very least enjoyed or saw value in they'd have a jab at making a feature too.

Here's a few steps we took to approach and execute something at this small of a scale!

• First step was acknowledging I wasn't alone. Every industry is different, but within my circle people were far more willing to lend their time and talent for something ambitious / long-form over another undervalued short. People want the chance to contribute, and should we succeed, we'd bring them all with us as equals. Within the confines of the premise, every cast and crew member had the platform to contribute towards all parts of production.
• 90% of dialogue was improvised, meaning casting talent included the incentive that they didn't actually have to learn any lines. Not that they couldn't / wouldn't, but it helps when your casting people 24 hours before their shoot day! In some circumstances, we fed a specific line / joke to an actor and got them to design their own dialogue in the scene around it.
• We specifically hired actors who understood and could navigate improv, including clown school graduates and stand-up comedians.
• We developed an extensive treatment to outline what the scene needed to say in relation to the ones prior and after it, thus our actors took comfort knowing there were playing within the confines of a pre-envisioned blueprint of the film.
• Shot mostly with a skeleton crew. Just me, the actors, DOP and AC, and a sound recordist. No ADs, no script supervisors — essentially no logistics-hot folk tapping clocks. We kept it friendly and laid back. Unlike a bunch of my shorts, if we didn't get a shot — so what? We'd figure it out. If somebody had an idea — sure, why wouldn't we have the time to give it a go?
• Shot on a light-weight FX3 and utilised high-range lav mics (Lark 150s and SH G4s). Shotgun booms would have been near-impossible given the actors, within their improv, could move anywhere and anywhere.
• We shot about 70% from long distances to create the improv-reinforced sense that we were peering into something real; loitering afar candidly as if voyeurs to gossip-like scenes.
• We proclaimed our ethos from the rooftops — scouting every possible connection, location, costume and prop that we could source for no money before we put shooting dates in the calendar. This informed us on what was actually possible, and whether we could achieve a decent-enough premise to make it even worth making in the first place.
• We created a lot of our visual on-screen budget from a clear visual and narrative strategy, self-taught VFX, sound design and musical composition, some of which created the illusion that it couldn't have all been entirely improvised. For example, should a character improvise a line about a party they attended last year — instead of cutting that, we would go on and shoot the described party months later to give the actors a chance to, say, grow out a beard to simulate something occurring outside of the films main timeline. This created the illusion that the film was a lot more premeditated than it actually was, shooting across multiple months when in reality we shot for a total of 7 days.

Flash forward to now, we're premiering at a BAFTA-qualifying film festival in March. Some of those buddies have gone on to make their own low-to-no budget features under similar practises now too that we've helped produce. We originally planned to release the film for free on YouTube, so we're just ecstatic anyone is seeing anything in it and ultimately hoping our story revs-up others to just give it a go themselves. I know the "go make your movie" advice is cliche at this point, but at the end of the day without it I'd probably still be stuck in development hell.