The Ultimate Film Budgeting Guide [FREE Film Budget Template] – No Film School

So, you’re planning to make a film. That’s great, perhaps you are a producer or maybe an independent filmmaker. On larger film sets it is the line producer or unit production manager who prepares the film's budget, and to do this they may use film budgeting software such as Movie Magic.
But budgeting software can be expensive and for many projects, it makes sense to use a free template like the one we're going to provide here:

All you need in addition to the template?
Just some fundamental knowledge on how to use it effectively!
Whatever your job role and desired budget, this following guide will go through all of the areas of budgeting that you need to examine from pre-production to distribution.
But first things first…
The expectations of your film will help determine what type of budget you are looking for.
For instance, perhaps you are hoping to make a micro-budget collab with friends, or maybe you are aiming to attract stars and cinema distribution. Not to mention that the schedule of a film with a budget will look a lot different from that of a DIY venture.
As such, your desired outcome for your film can help determine what range of budget you need when you fill out your film budget template. Netflix, for example, has camera requirements and even self-distribution can prove to be very expensive. I am not saying that you can’t make a hit micro-budget film. Just that it’s wise to plan what type of film and schedule you are hoping to create before you draft your budget.

Some questions you need to consider are – How are you hoping to fund your film? And how much time are you willing to spend acquiring that funding? You might also like to check out our podcast episode – 100 different ways to get your film funded
In order to estimate your film's budget, you need to decide how many days you aim to be in production. Studio films get by on shooting only one page of script a day. The majority of films average about five pages, and a low-budgets can plan to shoot as many as ten.
In general, the more days of filming the more your film will cost however, a larger budget will attract more experienced crew and arguably the more professional your film will look.
This brings us back to the last section, you need to decide what type of film you are hoping to make, and what type of filming experience you want to have.

If you are clueless on how to determine a shooting schedule you could always hire a line producer to help you. If you are low-budget, you can still ask producers with experience on shooting with budget restrictions for advice.
To break down your script first list all of your scenes then next to them list their locations and a brief description of the action taking place in each scene. The majority of films are shot out of sequence. You may have several scenes in the same location that can be shot on the same day. Determine how many pages you will be shooting each day, and create a basic shooting schedule. This can be re-drafted as you get closer to production. For more on schedules, we break it all down here.
Also, keep in mind that some scenes such as dialogue scenes will be a lot easier to shoot than stunt sequences. Having an idea of how many production days you need will help a great deal with your film budget breakdown.
You can find our more detailed advice for breaking down a script here.

Now that you have an idea of how many days you will be filming, you can begin to break down your film production budget. You also now have an estimate of how many days of filming you need for each actor. Start by jotting down the number of days you need for each actor in your film budget template.
How much are you going to pay your actors? Most actors will be getting paid by the recommended union rates in their country (typically SAG in the USA). Well-known or famous actors will have a rate to be negotiated by their managers. Some actors will also have their own going daily rates. For low-budgets, you need to have an idea of how much you can afford to pay each actor.
Plan to be shooting for a few more extra days than expected, in case pickups any are needed. You may also be required to pay for several rehearsal/prep days. For example, a musical feature will have a longer prep time for actors to learn songs and dance sequences.
You might also wish to book your actors in for a few extra days of promotion. Such as photography for the film's movie poster, or to shoot some interviews to be used in marketing. If your script requires it several supporting artists may also be needed.

The Above-the-line crew is the essential members of your crew that you will need to hire before pre-production can begin. Film crew might be members of unions, they might also have agents or their own daily working rates.
If you are low-budget check out our article – What to do if you can’t afford to pay your crew?
Screenwriter – Firstly you need to pay your screenwriter. Typically screenwriters get 2% of the film's production budget, their payment will need to be negotiated before you start work on the film. Depending on the project, story rights may also need to be obtained (for example, if you are making a film based on an adaption of a book, video game, or play).
Producer – The producer can be the highest paid crew member, they are typically the first person to get hired and the last to leave a project. As such, they can receive up to 5% of the production budget. In short, the more experienced the producer the more they will charge.

Director – Your director is the creative force and vision behind your film. You will need to decide how many prep days you will be paying them for and what their rate will be during post-production where they will supervise the edit.
Director of Photography – The DOP is traditionally put below-the-line, however, they are an integral part of the production. They also tend to have higher wages than the rest of the crew and need to be hired during early pre-production.
After hiring your key crew members you can begin to find the rest of your team. Your director and DOP might also have recommendations on who to hire at this stage. Whilst hiring your crew consider if additional prep time is needed for each role during pre-production. The size of your budget will determine how big a crew you can afford to have. Also, keep in mind the larger the crew, the slower the shooting days can become.
Check out our list of film crew positions, and our corresponding infographic.

This list is a list of key crew members you should consider –
Remember you can download our free film budget template to help you work through these job roles. Film crew members might have their own daily working rates and guidelines can be found on union websites. You also will need to consider what you will pay if you shoot overtime. A typical film production day is 12 hours long, for overtime you will need to pay additional wages. At the very least you need to be honest with your crew on what they should expect in terms of working hours and breaks.

Now you have a basic layout of how many days you will be shooting, how many actors will be needed, and what crew you are going to hire. There are also some extra costs that might arise during pre-production. These will depend on your budget and scale of your production.
For example, a low-budget film can hold it’s production department in a crew member's house. A contemporary drama will cost less in production design than a sci-fi.

The bulk of your budget (unless you are shooting a CGI-heavy film), will go towards the production costs. The most expensive costs are likely going to be your cast and crew wages. Your crew will be able to help guide you on what they will need to be hired and sourced. This following section will go through some of the key areas you need to be thinking about during this stage in your budget breakdown.
Equipment/Insurance – Film equipment is expensive as such make sure you get the proper insurance needed to cover you if anything breaks. You might be renting, buying or hiring crew with their own equipment. You will need to find camera, lighting and grip equipment. You will also need to make sure you have high-quality sound equipment.
Locations – Obtaining and gaining permission for locations can be expensive. Unless you are on public-owned land you will need to seek permission. For low budgets and student films, you will be able to get away with more, especially if you have a small crew. Seek in advance what permission you need for filming in each location. If using fake guns and weapons in a public space you will need to inform the local police before you shoot. Here is our in-depth piece on locations and location agreements.
Production Design – Set design is often overlooked on indies but can make all the difference on screen. Consider each scene in your film and how much money you be dedicating to set design. Are there any notable props in your film that need to be created or bought.
Costume – Every actor appearing in your film will need costumes bought or made for them. The cost of costume will once again depend on the genre of the film. For lead actors, several identical copies of the same costume may need to be bought. On low-budget films, you can ask actors to bring their own clothes, but it would be ideal to have copies for lead roles.
Hair and Make-up – Depending on your genre you might have a large budget towards make-up. You will need to reimburse make-up artists for the cost of any specialist make-up (such as fake blood). Even on a low-budget contemporary film, you will need a make-up artist for applying basic cover-up and for keeping the actor's continuity in check.
Catering – How many heads are you feeding? What will be the allocated budget for food each day? On low budgets, this can be done cheaply by having friends help out. On larger sets hire a professional catering service. Like an army – a film crew marches on its stomach. Check out our basic guidelines to help make sure you don't run afoul of your team on this.
Transport and Accommodation – You will need to pay for any transport costs of cast and crew. This includes fuel if crew members make long trips back and forth during production. On larger film sets all expenses will be covered, on low-budgets, you will need to discuss fuel expenses with crew before production. Accommodation might need to be paid for several cast and crew. For low budgets hire locally to avoid these additional expenses.
To figure out how much all of these elements cost you will need to do some research. Have a look at costs for camera hire, check out the cost of a local catering service. During the early stages of pre-production, your budget breakdown is an estimate, you can re-draft later with the help of your crew and production staff. It’s likely there will be several re-drafts of your budget during the making of your film. Always overestimate the cost, so that you don’t get caught out later, additionally have some cash leftover for petty cash expenses during filming.

As mentioned production is likely to be the most expensive phase of filmmaking. During post-production the costs will vary depending on genre and if any computer effects are needed. Ideally, you will want to hire your editor in advance even during the pre-production stage.
On many sets, the editor or assistant editor will be cutting footage alongside the shoot. They will also be creating dailies (rushes) for the producer, director and DOP to look over every night. With digital technology, this process has become easier and you can get part of the edit complete even before post-production begins.
Typically, the distribution costs of a film are not included in the budget breakdown. However, if you are an independent filmmaker you don’t want to get caught out later on in the filmmaking process. Having a distribution plan before making your film is ideal, perhaps surprisingly the costs of making a film don’t end once the film has been completed.
Film festivals have fees to enter, you might also wish to have key crew and cast attend film premiers. For larger budgets hire a PR team, major festivals recommended that even smaller productions hire a sales agent. Then there is self-distribution, you may wish to organize your own cinema screenings or DVD sales. Making money in film costs money and you can find a great film budget example of a $1 million independent feature film on Stephen Follows blog.
So, there you have it. This guide is here to show you the important elements that you need to consider when estimating your film's budget. No matter what type of film you hope to make, or budget you wish to work with. Creating a budget breakdown, and revising that breakdown throughout the filmmaking process will help keep your expenses under check. Next up, check out what you need to know about prepping your script for production!
Of course, we don’t know everything and if there are any areas you wish to expand upon, or tips for budgeting you wish to share, please do so in the comments section.
The main titles of a TV show play a key role in creating the mood at the start of each episode.
This post was written by Michelle Gallina and originally appeared on Adobe blog on Sept. 29, 2023.

Intriguing visuals, captivating music, and clever editing spark curiosity about the storyline and characters, motivating viewers to watch further. Plains of Yonder co-founders Katrina Crawford and Mark Bashore are masters of the art, having produced opening sequences for two series nominated in the same 2023 Emmy Award category of Outstanding Main Title Design: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and The White Lotus season two.
To create the two completely different nominated sequences, Crawford and Bashore used Adobe Creative Cloud tools including Premiere Pro and After Effects, producing short visual stories that echo characters and events in the shows.
The White Lotus opening titles were so popular with viewers that they went viral on TikTok, with the world-famous Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam showcasing its collection by imitating the artwork in the sequence.
The White Lotus Season 2 Opening Theme Song | The White Lotus | HBOwww.youtube.com
Meanwhile, The Rings of Power made compelling use of music, vibrations, and shifting sand patterns to evoke the mythic symbols of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy world.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power – Title Sequencewww.youtube.com
How did you first get into title design? What drew you to it?
We sort of fell into it. Main title design is a strange and lovable niche and seems to suit us well. We have always strived for film work that is beyond pleasing to look at and is emotional at its core—and main titles are a creative conceptual puzzle like nothing else. We want audiences to fall in love with the idea behind the titles as much as the executed sequence itself, and to see new things on repeat viewings. It’s a bit like being asked to make an original, short art film that captures the psychology and internal logic of a show in a very original way. It’s always a real puzzle, and we love solving puzzles.
What was the inspiration behind your title sequences? What were you trying to achieve?
With The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, our goal was to create a sequence that felt primordial and vast in time and space, with deep allegorical symbology. Taking inspiration from J.R.R Tolkien’s Ainur (immortal angelic beings that sang such beautiful music that it created the world), we conceived a main title sequence built from the world of sound. To do this we used a process called cymatics, where sound vibrations at various frequencies cause small particles to form patterns. In this case we used sand to form the shapes of rings and other symbols that relate to the myths of Middle Earth.
For The White Lotus, we took inspiration from the Italian locations of season two. Here, the sacred and profane seem to live comfortably side-by-side. We loved the idea of beautiful paintings speaking to themes of romance, lonely hearts, carnal lust, violence, and potential doom.
How did you begin these projects? Can you talk about the collaborative process with the director and the process of creating the sequences from start to finish?
At the start of The Rings of Power project, we built a cymatics rig. Katrina experimented with everything from humpback whale sounds to Gregorian chants, to see the effect on sand, flour, pepper, and other materials. She filmed the experiments, and we knew we had captured something beautifully uncontrollable. The entire project was really a massive physical and CG science experiment. In the end, we created thousands of images and motion samples in CG and live action to find the right answers. We also worked extensively with the team at the show to decide which symbols to visualize, as well as worked closely with Howard Shore’s score to make sure every moment of movement was tied to the music.
We took a completely different approach with The White Lotus. Director/Showrunner Mike White sent us some footage from his phone of a villa near Palermo where they were going to film an episode of the show. The walls are covered in trompe l’oeil frescoes. There was an obvious connection to our Hawaiian wallpaper theme from season one. Katrina traveled with a photographer to the villa and shot high-res photography for two days as a base from which to work.
Describe your favorite part or component of the title sequence. How did it come together and how did you achieve it?
By far our favorite part of The White Lotus was translating the script into the artwork. We picked up traits of the characters, broad story themes, or even re-visualized actual scenes, like a Vespa ride reimagined on a donkey. We came up with visuals for each character and we worked hard to delight audiences when they see those personality traits play out in the episodes.
The best part of The Rings of Power was the "celestial" section where we move away from the logic of a tabletop and the imagery is layered in space. It becomes spiritual and completely non-rational at that point. We also love the scenes where imagery is forming and collapsing at the same time, like the early shots of the rings. There is a sadness and deep metaphor there—nothing lasts, everything in life is in a constant state of forming and un-forming.
What were some specific challenges you faced in making the sequences and how did you go about solving them?
Virtually every shot in the titles of The Rings of Power has some combination of CG and live action. CG tends to be too perfect, too smooth, and can lack a sense of danger. The live action is the opposite, it’s feral and uncontrollable. Getting the live action to behave, and ‘breaking’ the CG was the key to bringing them together.
There is no actual moving film in The White Lotus title sequence. It’s all built from photography and still digital paint, so the idea of creating emotion, movement, and drama from stills was daunting and very rewarding. There was a moment at the start where we said to ourselves, “Oh no, we sold them a slideshow.” But in the edit, we came up with the idea of sliding around a world of painted imagery. We created some magical moments where the camera moves across a painting and arrives at a completely different painting. Rather than appearing to look at individual paintings, we were after a more abstract, painted world that sort of washes over viewers.
What Adobe tools did you use on this project and why did you originally choose them? Why were they the best choice for this project?
For The Rings of Power, we used Photoshop for the original style frames, Premiere Pro for editing, and After Effects for title animation and compositing. For The White Lotus, we used Photoshop to create completely original paintings while existing paintings were altered or re-combined. We also used Premiere Pro for the edit, including approximating the camera moves. After Effects was used in compositing and type animation.
If you could share one tip about Premiere Pro or After Effects, what would it be?
When cutting to music, we often make cuts at least two frames before the actual music shift, beat or hit. It creates an energy in the mind that is different than a perfectly synched edit. There are a couple of cuts in The Rings of Power that cut significantly before the music edit, so there is a noticeable moment between the image and music change. This is quite easy to do using the audio waveforms on the timeline. Simply find the audio moment and backspace twice to make your video edit. We promise you’ll like your edit moment better.
We also recommend creating shortcuts that become a personal language between you and the program. For instance, we love color-coding strong clips in the project bin with mango, which means that it’s a superior shot to all the rest. It’s a keyboard shortcut M. It’s a funny and dumb little game between ourselves and the software. Mango means “put it in the movie.” It also stands out on the grey workspace. If you don’t see at least fifteen mango shots in the project, you're just going to have to save the film with great editing.
Who is your creative inspiration and why?
Crawford: People who are polymaths are my inspiration. People who look at problems from countless angles and are ever curious.
Bashore: Michael Moore, Ai Weiwei, and today, Sinéad O’Connor. I revere them for their unrestful, rebellious application of film, art, and music, respectively.
What’s the toughest thing you’ve had to face in your career and how did you overcome it? What advice do you have for people aspiring to get into the motion design space?
Bashore: Fear. I didn’t have the confidence to do this until after doing many other things for a living and then being around film and design for many years. I owe a lot of the credit to some important people who simply said, “You can do this.”
My advice to those aspiring to get into this is to put your own personal worldview into your work. It’s possible to do so to some degree on every project. Try to find an emotional center for every project that has a part of you in it (sadness, anger, loss, laughter, mischief) and tap into your own sense of those emotions. Then, you are not really designing, but rather creating something with heart that viewers will feel.
Crawford: Probably getting over the idea that art was somehow soft. In my family growing up, visual art was not respected as career-worthy. It took three science degrees to get over that idea. Alas having that unique perspective is vital to art, so I guess my advice would be to take all your unique angles and put them into what you make.
Share a photo of where you work. What’s your favorite thing about your workspace and why?
Credit: Mark Bashore
Bashore: I like my edit area because it’s stripped down, un-slick, un-sleek and the opposite of a so-called professional editing suite. I like that paper, art, and physical things live next to the computer. I have a piece of pine board and a good strong C clamp to support my elbow for long-haul edits.
Credit: Katrina Crawford
Crawford: My workspace has a lot of light which I appreciate. It is also a space used for other forms of art making and so it tends to be alive with many ideas and projects in various forms.
This post was written by Michelle Gallina and originally appeared on Adobe blog on Sept. 29, 2023.
Is the AI future of VO for video already here?
“Wow! That felt a little bit too poetic” is just one example of an AI-generated speech sentence that Runway’s text-to-speech tool has generated that is causing some buzz on the internet.
And for many who work in the traditional voice-over world, it’s might be scary to hear how good these audio files are starting to sound.
With a long history of voice-over being a part of all types of film and video projects and production, the overall video industry is looking to potentially shift very quickly into this new era of generative AI audio. Which, when coupled with other AI features like auto-transcriptions and text-based editing, might be one of the first areas to be completely revolutionized by AI.
Let’s take a look at Runway’s text-to-speech (also stylized text-2-speech and T2T) tool and explore how it is already changing the VO industry.
That’s the line shared by Twitter (aka X) user Nicolas Neubert that showcases just how powerful and versatile Runway’s Text-to-speech tool can be. With different inputs of slightly different versions of the same sentence, you can really see and hear just how drastically different and nuanced these AI-generated audio clips can be.
The voice sounds crisp, clear, and, most importantly, very real. And with these different recordings only requiring the entering of different prompts with slightly different punctuation and grammar, the results are starting to get quite frightening — especially if you’re someone who works in traditional voice-over recording.
Here’s the entire thread if you’d like to hear the samples.
As someone who got their start with a small video production agency just over a decade ago, I can certainly attest to just how frustrating (and yet sometimes satisfying) the world of voice-over for video can be.
In the past, if you wanted to have a voice-over track for your video, you would either need to record it yourself — either with a talented VO artist in your studio or perhaps just with your own voice — or you would need to reach out to professionals.
And over the years, there have been plenty of online options for professional voice-over work. Many of the sites were quite successful as they would help producers and creators alike send over packets of dialogue (sometimes hundreds of pages), and they would help you find the right voice-over artist for your needs.
There would be some back and forth as you’d review different artists who would often record test versions of your voice-over scripts. You could then share these with clients or make selections on your own, then pay for the full recordings — plus any revisions after the fact.
That was the past, though, and it certainly looks like this AI-generated voice-over route is the one of the future. And while there are several AI startups offering text-to-speech out there, Runway is by far one of the biggest and most successful AI companies currently on the market.
And, from the sounds of it, their text-to-speech tool is one of the best.
At the low cost of 1 credit per 50 text characters, creatives can convert text to speech with a wide variety of options and controls. (We must note that the cost is a bit tricky to convey as Runway credits are granted on a monthly basis based on your membership level, which you can check out here.)
Here are the basic steps to get started:
To actually generate your audio, you can follow these steps:
It might take a little while to get used to the AI-prompt system, especially if you don’t have too much experience with AI in general — if you are serious about trying out this AI voice over feature — this might be your first step into what is undoubtedly going to be the future of the industry.

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