35mm budget help

Galen Carter-Jeffrey · September 22, 2006

I am putting together a budget proposal for a short 35mm film. It is for the coca cola refreshing filmmakers contest. I know absolutely nothing about the cost of 35mm film (raw or processing costs). I want to shoot a 50 second short using a 10 to 1 shooting ratio. I used kodak film counter and calculated about 900 feet. Is that correct? Can someone tell me how much processing would be and about how much it would be to telecine.

It can be ballpark figures it's just for a budget proposal.

Thank you.

Adam Frisch FSF · September 22, 2006

The shorter a subject matter, and the more edits it's got, the less accurate the 10:1 shooting ratio becomes. It's mainly a rough reference for long form material. On a regular commercial, that's roughly the same lenght as you mentioned, it's not uncommon to shoot 200:1 or more. So, you should probably budget for a bit more film unless you know you can get away 2 rolls.

Chien Huey · September 22, 2006

I was a 2nd AC on one of these entries and they shot 2000' of film. We shot every last bit except 10'. I believe contestants get 2000' of film from Fuji. The producers bought an extra 400' roll just in case but we never touched that.

However, it should be mentioned that we were very precious with every take. The DP was also a very experienced guy who's done a million commercials so he knew exactly what's necessary and what's not. With a less experienced DP you may end up using more film. One example is that we had trouble getting a 40' dolly move with boom. He cut it off after 3 takes when it became clear that we wouldn't get anything better than what we had gotten instead of burning through film.

The entry was in the 2006 contest and it was called "Vollarians Unite!" in case you wanna get an idea of what we ended up with 2000' of footage.

Edited September 22, 2006 by Chien Huey

Galen Carter-Jeffrey · September 22, 2006

I was a 2nd AC on one of these entries and they shot 2000' of film. We shot every last bit except 10'. I believe contestants get 2000' of film from Fuji. The producers bought an extra 400' roll just in case but we never touched that.

However, it should be mentioned that we were very precious with every take. The DP was also a very experienced guy who's done a million commercials so he knew exactly what's necessary and what's not. With a less experienced DP you may end up using more film. One example is that we had trouble getting a 40' dolly move with boom. He cut it off after 3 takes when it became clear that we wouldn't get anything better than what we had gotten instead of burning through film.

The entry was in the 2006 contest and it was called "Vollarians Unite!" in case you wanna get an idea of what we ended up with 2000' of footage.

I just watched it. It was cute. What was your shooting schedule like?

Chien Huey · September 27, 2006

I just watched it. It was cute. What was your shooting schedule like?

It was shot overnight over a weekend. So Saturday and Sunday we shot from 11am to 7am. The theater we shot in let us shoot in there for free as long as it was overnight. We did shoot during the midnight showings of King Kong so halfway through a crowd would pop out of one of the theaters.