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How do you make a movie for $5000?

still from frisky film

Claudia Pickering (right) wrote, directed, produced and starred in Frisky, her first feature.

Five thousand dollars is no small amount of cash, but in the film industry it might as well be pocket change. According to filmmaker Claudia Pickering, “5K would only cover food for one day on a normal film.” So how did she make a whole feature for that amount?

Short answer: She did nearly everything herself. Claudia served as writer, director, producer and star of her debut feature film Frisky, a coming-of-age comedy about two mates couch surfing in San Francisco. She had a chat with Ben and Liam about the process she went through to create her first film.

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“The only things we spent money on, basically, were taking everyone out for lunch every day, so you keep everyone real happy, post-production sound and colour, and hiring a couple nice lenses,” says Claudia. “Everybody who was involved has a profit share proportional to the amount of time they gave to us, so I’m not just laughing all the way to the bank.”

The film’s narrow budget meant that Claudia had to come up with some creative solutions to problems the crew faced in production. “The first decision I made was that we weren’t gonna be able to afford permits,” admits Claudia. “A huge part of keeping the budget down was writing a script knowing where I was gonna shoot it and what I could get away with. Any public space where we did need permits, we just wore film school clothing.”

Claudia also gave some quick, practical tips on how young creatives can jump into feature filmmaking.

What’s your advice for developing filmmakers?

Make stuff! Make stuff! Make crappy stuff. I didn’t just suddenly go ‘I want to make a feature film’ and then I suddenly knew how to write a feature film. I worked my bum off, I’d made a tonne of silly sketches with friends, and you get excited and you start learning about stuff. I went and did a one week intensive course at NYU in the summertime, and I was like ‘I’m gonna learn how to structure a feature film.’ Make sure you have your ducks in a row, and then once you’ve got that done, just bloody shoot it! Get some mates together and shoot it.

How do you make filming sex scenes less awkward on a budget?

It’s so awkward! I don’t know how to make them less awkward – if you’re filming other people, [you have to] create a really trusting environment and check that everyone’s really comfortable so that they don’t feel like a giant goose, because you’re gonna see that on their face.

Did you ever wanna throw this project away? What motivates you to finish a project?

Honestly, there wasn’t any time to reconsider it. I had six months left in the US and I wrote it at the beginning of the six month period and we shot it within the first three months and had it totally done. There wasn’t any time for [doubt]. It helps that it’s a whole bunch of really personal stories that were burning a whole in my heart. That keeps you going. If you’re telling stories you don’t really care about, you’re gonna question it. If you’re absolutely frothing on it, you can’t stop.