# …And They Can Say Really Mean Things
My budget for the Coward is $100,000. Its a big number for a small film, and a really big and ambitious target to hit via any source – grants, crowdfunding or private donations (I’ve already spent my own funds on Day 1). The obvious solution is to spread the pain across multiple sources, reducing the ask to a more reasonable number.
But $100K is still the ultimate spend, and its a scary one. For months I’ve been nursing the hope that “The Coward” could be made for…$75,000? But the budget spreadsheet told a very different story. I thought I had a budgeting problem – turns out I had a reality problem.
Every time I tried to trim below $99,000, something essential vanished. Background performers disappeared until the battlefield looked empty. Two cameras was reduced to one, potential leaving me dead in the water if theres a delay or a technical issue, which for a complex battle sequence means missing shots or burning time we don’t have. The prosthetics rigs – the things that makes bodies split in half on camera – got cut from two builds to one.
As a professional A.D. that last item just gives me the complete heebie-jeebies. One rig means one catastrophic point of failure with no backup plan. This is not inconsequential – the visual of cannonballs cutting through rows of men is a critical narrative element of the script. And it isn’t just mindless gore – the sight is the penultimate crack in Kelly’s mind, before the bayonet charge finally breaks him. It must get to the editing room. So the rig must work and it must work multiple times. Every film crewperson has dark memories of building something critical and complex and testing, testing, testing it until you’re 1,000,000% sure it’ll work. You carefully pack it up, carefully transport it to set, carefully set it up, test it, test it – excellent, it works. Roll Sound! Camera! Ready, and ACTION!!!
Doesn’t work.
So cutting the rigs down to one became the point where I said STOP. Listen to your instincts, Conor. Hold up, fellas. Let’s clean the slate and rebuild the budget from the ground up, counting every-damn-cent. If I’m going to cut back on a critical piece of filmmaking and narrative infrastructure and it fails, then I better not find later on that there actually was money in the budget, there was a way to cover myself for failure. I’d just lose a bit of my sanity, I think.
The $75,000 all-in target was based on both program limits (the Canada Council For The Arts has a grant up to that amount) and, if I’m honest – on fear. Fear of looking greedy. Fear of repeating my previous grant failures. Fear of spending too much of other people’s money.
Going through this budget rebuild taught me the truth of my situation: “The Coward” will cost $99,000.
I was a fool to think it could be made for less.
There’s no way around that. Below $99,000, I’m not making “The Coward” anymore. I’m making something else. Something lesser. Soft. Lame. Forgettable. I could spend $75,000 in total and have a shitty film to show for it. Or I spend $99,000 and have an amazing film. The devil lurks in that $24,000 gap, of course; but thats where the Kickstarter comes in.
So, I’ll fit my grant ask within the CCA’s limit ($75,000) and use Kickstarter to top up to the final amount – $99,000.
The previous grant applications didn’t fail because of the asked amount. They were weak applications that couldn’t justify their asks.
This time, as I build out my application for the CCA and prep for a Kickstarter in August, I know exactly what each dollar buys and why it matters. Two prosthetics rigs instead of one means redundancy when you’re cutting actors in half. It also means the possibility of two bodies in frame simultaneously – dramatically superior footage that’s impossible with a single setup.
The second camera isn’t luxury either. For simultaneous action across a battlefield, single-camera means coverage gaps or missed moments. For prosthetics rigs and stunts, two cameras cover the same action from different angles. Something can happen to ruin the take for A-Cam – but it might not for B-Cam. You get redundancy and flexibility, two enormously important aspects in any filmmaking process. Fourteen Background Performers lets me build two ranks and have a guy or two to move about in-frame.
So, the budget re-build confirmed what the film will actually cost to make, and to make well.
Now the grant application has to make that case to a jury that’s seen me ask for big money twice before, and get shot down twice.
Numbers don’t negotiate. But neither does quality. You don’t get what you don’t pay for…
Onwards!
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