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Necessary Filmmaking: An Excerpt from Jake Mahaffy’s Micro-Budget Methods of Cinematic Storytelling
A still from Jake Mahaffy's currently untitled next feature A Filmmaker 25 New Face from 2005, Jake Mahaffy has been making microbudget films for two decades and has now distilled his creative and production philosophies in a new book, Micro-Budget Methods of Cinematic Storytelling: A Practical Guide to Making Narrative Media with Minimal Means, published April 2025 from Routledge. In the excerpt below, Mahaffy outlines several foundational concepts microbudget filmmakers should embrace.—Scott Macaulay
Ownership, Intelligent Design and Creative Control
Limitations imposed upon you are called “restrictive,” but limitations you impose on yourself are “creative choices.” Professionals set their own rules all the time. Regardless of budget, directors will force themselves to work under hard limits. This is called design. Design determines what lenses must be used, whether the camera moves or not or whether artificial light is used. Maybe every frame must be composed symmetrically, maybe every angle must represent a character’s point-of-view, maybe the entire film is shot on a single, wide-angle lens, or in black and white. These are self-imposed restrictions. Even if you could afford to do whatever you want, it doesn’t mean you should. Bold choices and hard limits actually expand your creative options.
The goal of micro-budget film is not to produce cheap knock-offs of big-budget movies like imitation jewelry or souvenir replicas. This shouldn’t be a sad bastard version of “real” moviemaking. There’s no shame in this process if you take responsibility for what you’re doing. The goal is not to fake what money can buy. The goal is to make work that money can’t buy. We design and build the risky cinematic experiences that big money can’t accomplish. All money comes at a cost. Big-budgets, because of their commercial and political mandates, can’t afford to make micro-budget movies. We can afford to depict original stories in uniquely cinematic ways, which big-budgets avoid by default.
Integrity is essential. Integrity can be defined as acting in accordance with the totality. It’s the opposite of pretension. A sense of proportion, knowing true scale, will keep you from accidentally pretending to be something that you’re not. Working in an unconventional way can be highly efficient and productive as long as you don’t suffer any illusions. Edgar Degas was painting landscapes with a student. He noticed that, despite constant correction, his student kept changing the position of a tree on his canvas to improve the composition. Degas was outraged. The entire point of painting was not to make a pretty picture but to discover true beauty in the way things actually are. The canvas was just an excuse to look at reality more closely. This is how we find new meaning in the things we don’t understand.
Creative decisions should align with reality, not with our biased presumptions about how we want things to be. This attitude of absolute practicality is the laser beam that cuts through artifice and pretension. Despite the frustration it can cause us, it makes our work more specific and amplifies its power.
The Silk Shirt Story
Producer Mike Ryan tells his “silk shirt story” as an illustration. “A director is making a low-budget movie. The main character is a rich billionaire. He needs to wear a silk shirt because that’s what’s written in the script. The silk shirt demonstrates how rich the character is. So, Wardrobe goes to the thrift shop to find affordable costumes and buys a polyester shirt that kind of looks like silk. Wardrobe shows it to the director. The director approves because there’s no time or money to find anything better. The crew and everyone else can clearly see that it’s a cheap polyester shirt. The audience is going to see it’s a polyester shirt. It’s fake and no one will believe this story. It’s just a big mistake on-screen… But the micro-budget way is to admit that you don’t have money for a genuine silk shirt and change your story to match what you can afford.”
Change the story to match your circumstance. What if this character was only pretending to be rich? Maybe he’s rich but he’s allergic to silk, or he hides his wealth by wearing cheap, plastic clothes… or he wears it in humility like a hairshirt the way Mr. T wore duct-taped sneakers.
There are all kinds of specific story possibilities and character traits that present themselves, unique to your circumstance. The moral of this story applies to all aspects of production: acting style, props, VFX, cinematography, etc.
Film is a photo-realistic medium. It’s literal. The polyester shirt is not a silk shirt. The Panasonic is not an Alexa. The plastic Alibaba lens is not a Cooke prime. Your roommate is not Marlon Brando. You can’t hide what you show. Just as any good actor must “be in-the-moment” and responsive when performing a scene, directors must be too. You can’t pretend problems away. Imagine a movie scene where a hobo is supposed to shoot an alien. But while filming, the hobo actor accidentally drops his gun. Should the hobo pretend he didn’t drop his gun and just continue? Play a pantomime of shooting the alien? Or should he stay in character, pick the gun back up and incorporate his fumble into the scene? This (mis)take might be the best take. Now, why should a director perform any differently? When you run into a jam while filming, recognize it and innovate a creative solution instead of pretending it away, hoping that no one notices. I’ve been on projects where our budget gets whittled down while we’re filming! We can’t persist in shooting the film we planned on. Don’t passively watch your story get wrecked while the budget is reduced. If you start with an idea that you can’t afford, you’ll only be disappointed when the story is compromised. Instead, we construct an original idea to fit a readymade scenario that costs no cash.
With micro-budget, we anticipate the consequences of any monetary spend and build the story to match from the start. This requires ambition combined with serenity, willpower and determinism. The filmmaker will expend every effort to accomplish a specific goal, knowing that failure is the only path to success. You become highly attuned to obstacles that frustrate your goals. Learn to absorb these obstacles into your plans. We don’t have the money to overwhelm force with counterforce, so we cleverly navigate around and through our challenges. We invent what money can’t imagine.
As Bruce Lee said, “Be water, my friend.” Flow around resistance. Feelings of frustration are a preverbal sign of creative opportunity. It’s a chance to apply ingenious solutions: to realize your style and your vision. It doesn’t matter how crazy, persecuted and underfunded you feel behind the scenes. These are feelings. Consistent creative choices of any quality look like aesthetic control. This is the organizing principle of intelligent design. Viewers will internalize the logic of your design and infer the presence of a director’s creative control.
Controlling your environment means designing the mise-en-scène. This includes all of the costs involved with extras, art department, lighting, road closures, sound stages, location rentals, rain machines, giant silks, special effects, stunts, cranes, etc. It’s whatever you manage to add to the frame. But on a micro-budget, we may not afford all of these things. How can we creatively and cinematically adapt storytelling needs to circumstances that don’t match our production plans? If you can’t afford to control the external environment, you learn to control your reactions to the environment.
A micro-budget approach means we first flip the process. Building sets is costly. Story ideas are free. Create a story to match your circumstance rather than seeking money to meet the circumstances of your story. Design a story for what is already freely available in the world.
Turn the obstacles that would frustrate your storytelling into the story itself.
Principal Strategies
There are five key principles to working in a micro-budget mode.
1. Develop story concepts based on what you can afford at the moment. We deliberately build story around available resources. Ask yourself right now, “What is at hand?” This moves you out of hoping for the ideal into recognizing the real. You don’t dream up any old story and then go about trying to find money to make it. You begin by evaluating specific assets and building a story around a creative combination of those elements. What camera is available? What locations? What characters? Mundane reality can be dramatized by forcing contrasts and weird combinations. An easy example of a desktop film: edit together a montage of free stock footage from tropical vacation spots and add the voiceover of a misanthrope complaining about how everything sucks. This could be a hilarious intro to the story of a pessimist character that learns to lighten up. You can work with photographs, puppets, animation, PowerPoint, video chats, found footage… there are endless possibilities. But let’s say you aim for a character-based drama. Minimally, you’ll need a person, a place, and a camera. Maybe you have a friend in real estate, and you live in an area with abandoned houses. There’s a story. For years, the Duplass brothers had been trying to get a feature funded. One day, out of frustration, they decided to shoot a short, no matter what. The two of them filmed inside their own apartment kitchen on a handy-cam. Jay shot Mark trying to leave a greeting on his answering machine. This mundane task turned into a hilarious, existential identity crisis. Their seven-minute short This is John (2003) screened at Sundance and launched their careers.
Big-budget movies ring-fence reality. They build circumstances to match their stories. They pay money to build their world and safely ensconce their production in a carefully controlled reality: a set, soundstage or virtual environment. Shortfalls and limitations are highlighted and categorized in a film’s pre-production phase after the script is already written. On a big-budget, “limitations” refer to whatever can’t be excluded or changed to fit the script. Inversely, with micro-budgets, we build stories to match our circumstances. We write projects that don’t have limitations because they don’t have as many requirements. By constructing story out of free and available resources, we design a tailor-made concept that can be expanded in dynamic, cinematic ways. This is better than a negatory, reductive approach of whittling down big-budget ideas crammed into tiny budgets. Our micro-budget stories may not always look like standard mainstream fare, but that’s the point. If we can’t afford to ring-fence reality, then both story and storytelling are subjected to conditions outside of our control. We must proactively incorporate these elements to avoid being victimized by them. We increase the specificity of our work by avoiding generic solutions that money offers.
2. Design a deliberate stylistic mode that emphasizes resources and technical restrictions. Instead of cheaply imitating big-budget processes with insufficient gear, you plan a nonconventional approach. The storytelling style must adopt available tech. Recognize the distinct visual attributes of any device you’re utilizing. Consider surveillance cams, stock footage, video games, phones or crunchy, grunge-core aesthetics: Bait (2019), Hundreds of Beavers (2022), Begotten (1989), Computer Chess (2013), The Forbidden Room (2015), Inland Empire (2006), La Jetée (1962), Superstar (1987), the V/H/S (2012–2024) anthologies or Close-Up (1990). These successful films all amplify their aesthetic distinctions instead of trying to hide them. Confidence and a good sense of humor are highly attractive, no matter your flaws.
Don’t average out your differences. Trying to achieve “normal” when you can’t afford it is a failed tactic. “Normal” is a highly subsidized, industrial product: it’s normal because it’s mass-distributed and everybody recognizes it. Your movie is just as likely to go unnoticed if it looks like everything else when it could stand out as entirely bona fide. There is no safety in conformity. Innovation and boldness can help to integrate differences into your style and get your work noticed. This is not only about technical qualities of the image like resolution or color space. Your choices in gear will also affect your crew size, schedule, location requirements and actors’ performances. Small, nimble cameras allow you to work quickly and unobtrusively. Heavy, double-system kits will be more difficult to move and require more crew to operate: each take, all day long, every day. It adds up. Every additional bit of gear comes at a cost of time, talent and support.
You can adopt your limitations and “mistakes” as your story and style. This is part of every creative process. A sculptor will press on a lump of clay, mushing and squeezing, continually evaluating the effect of these actions on the lump. Just because one single mush or squeeze of the clay wasn’t perfect doesn’t mean it was a mistake. It’s a continual process of responsive reshaping of the material. Any consistent pattern of mistakes or inadequacies can be designed into a distinctive aesthetic. It just takes coherent organization for these mistakes to function as effective creative choices. Hong Sang-soo’s In Water (2023) screened in some big festivals, and it’s almost entirely out of focus. Demonstrate creative control by constructing patterns: you’re designing an order from chaos.
For example, maybe your camera’s digital autofocus function requires centrally composed frames. So, symmetry and balance can become a visual motif in your project. You apply that principle consistently, even when you’re not using the digital autofocus function. Maybe you shoot a story on porches and patios overseen by doorbell cams. What kind of story concepts are evoked by this scenario? It could be a comedy of delivery drivers vs. porch thieves, or a thriller set around Halloween trick-or-treating. Whether it’s the schedule, the camera tech or the performances, all aspects of production are to be creatively magnified. Don’t try to hide the budget. Lean into it. Emphasize it. Pretending away the reality of your limitations while literally documenting it all in a photorealistic medium is delusional.
On one hand, you risk your film looking amateurish, bizarre or poorly done. But if confidently self-aware, you can draw audiences to the unconventional nature of the film. You’re breaking rules. You’re not conforming. Anything could happen. This isn’t just another harmless amusement. This film could go off the rails at any moment and take viewers into highly disruptive, emotional experiences. It could be transformative. Viewers will be unprepared for what the movie might do to them. There’s a felt sense of tension when watching a film that is not “movie-like.”
3. Design a deliberate story structure. This combines the first two points and adds the consideration of time-management.
1. Take into account your story elements: access to people and places.
2. Take into account your image capture: aesthetic for design.
3. Now, combining these, you construct a manner of telling the story.
These are the factors that determine innovative story structure. Time is a finite resource. Shooting schedules are either highly compressed or extended and periodic. A highly compressed schedule of shooting over a day or a week requires everyone involved to be available for that same short period. An extended, periodic schedule can be planned across several weeks, months or years.
Single location stories and continuous-take films are often designed as a result of budget constraints. The classic horror movie trope of summer camps and isolated country houses originated from these budgetary and scheduling factors. If you only have a few days to shoot, your goal must be to get as much usable footage as quickly as possible. This scenario often requires a lot of front-end prep and back-end post to rework whatever material you manage to capture. The hectic effort of shooting quickly under this scheduling pressure can translate to on-screen urgency. You could use a real-time or ticking-clock premise in the story. A compressed schedule means that locations are limited. Company moves require breaking down, traveling and setting up again at a new place. These are time consuming. Continuity for drama and shooting in story-world chronology is easier when everyone and everything is present in the same location for the short duration of a highly compressed schedule.
On an occasional, periodic shooting schedule, continuity and chronology can be difficult to maintain. Broken up over a long stretch, time can affect the appearances of characters and locations. There will be changing weather and seasons. These factors can lend themselves to fragmented narrative that accounts for ellipses and gaps in story. There could be drastic story ruptures. You might shoot in different styles and formats over different periods. You may utilize intertitles or chapter breaks in the edit to emphasize and acknowledge these changes. Or you may establish an episodic structure where every scene is a self-contained short film. Elephant (2003), Synecdoche, New York (2008), The Shining (1980), Knight of Cups (2015), The Mill and the Cross (2011), Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965), Passionless Moments (1983), Lost Highway (1997), Stranger than Paradise (1984), Andrei Rublev (1966) or the vignettes in Breaking the Waves (1996) are some well-known variations on these devices.
Fragmented, deeply subjective and nonlinear storytelling can invite viewers to interpret a film. Thrillers do this regularly with their final act twist that forces a reconstruction of story through last-minute revelations. But the same ploy can be applied to any genre. Story comprehension becomes a dynamic part of film viewing. Re-ordering story events and restricting a character’s point of view can create misdirections. This allows latitude in combining a mix of eclectic scenes and styles. Puzzle-like films like Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Memento (2000), Primer (2004), Adaptation. (2002), Trance (2013), Arrival (2016), Predestination (2014), Enemy (2013), The Machinist (2004), Jacob’s Ladder (1990) and Mulholland Drive (2001) are examples of these. This is a cost-free and innovative way to enhance any disruptions you have with continuity. It encourages repeated viewing by adding layers and transpositions of interpretation and meaning.
4. Self-fund: arrange for unpaid, volunteer, deferred-pay and other collaborative arrangements. Crowdfunding, crowd-sourcing, in-kind provisions and sharing ownership of the film are all forms of self-funding. Whatever money you raise is applied to fixed costs. Fixed costs include gas for travel to locations, food or meals on shoot days and expendables like hard drives, props or make-up. Fees and salaries are deferred or provided in trade or barter. If you can’t commit cash, can you commit more time, effort or other resources? None of this is legal advice and these suggestions only outline topics for further research and confirmation. Any film production as a commercial enterprise must pay people a minimum wage. This requires payroll accounting. Union contributions to health and pension must be deducted. There will be different minimum hourly or daily rates and overtime must be counted at hourly-rate-and-a-half. This all applies to “interns” as well. Expenses can be deducted for tax reporting when the project operates as a commercial enterprise. There will be other requirements depending on overall budget and state laws. Liability insurance is essential to cover any injury or loss associated with the production. A safety coordinator is necessary. You would also form a production LLC to reduce personal liability if things go awry.
On an independent, noncommercial, art project or collective venture, people are not employed and therefore not required to be paid in cash. Despite this, everyone involved should have a clear understanding of participation, expectations and outcomes. This can be written up in simple deal memos. Approach this work as collaborative instead of exploitative. A director-producer must still lead: a creative hierarchy must still be maintained, but without a contractual exchange of cash for time, other agreements for compensation are made. Absolute transparency is essential. This is informed consent. Don’t be coy or shy. Your own embarrassment over appearing exploitative of someone should not become actual dishonesty through vagueness or omission. Be clear, direct and apologetic. In order to get the best of people involved, everyone must have a personal motive to commit to the project: work experience, creative expression, a talent reel, for fun or for potential backend payouts. Working with someone is different than working for someone.
There’s nothing glamorous about the filmmaking process. It’s manual labor. Slick ads for shiny cars on rainy roads are not the same as the iron mining, welding and engineering that built the actual vehicle. The glitzy charm of festivals, awards and celebrity are part of a marketing strategy to sell movies. Misguided ideas of glamor will quickly fade once you begin the work. You can preemptively squash any potential disappointment among collaborators. Announce the financial principles of your project and remain deterministic in your attitude. You might decide that you will not spend a single cent. In that case, even if a very talented, professional person agrees to help you on a paid basis, you must decline. This is in accordance with the nature of your project. This is how you can formulate the integrity and unity of the work. It’s the opposite of meeting “Death in Baghdad.” Instead of running from limitations, you adopt them.
5. Avoid any approval or validation process. You’re independent because your work is entirely dependent on you. There’s no requirement to seek anyone else’s pre-approval: no development process, submission to investors, grant panels or other reviews. Without significant investment from others, there’s lower risk of financial loss and therefore no oversight. You’re free when nobody cares about you.
Some people crave the legitimacy of a formal production. Money, accounting and legalism add layers of formality. That can help to spread responsibilities around, but it doesn’t inherently improve the work itself. The goal of these auxiliary services should be to make the creative, filmmaking process easier, more effective and more fluent. But they can just as well gum up the process. This happens when overheads, assembly-line approach and administrative control outweigh creative possibilities. Creative control requires persistent self-reliance just as any entrepreneurial activity will do. You work under your own direction.
