These are a few points to consider when writing a low-budget screenplay is not all of them and I’ll try to discuss more in later posts. This is a suggested guideline from my experiences over the years working on independent micro and low budget movies.

• Create the screenplay around the fewest and best locations that you have in your area. You cannot do like the hollywood studios and build a 3 level battleship, so I wouldn’t write one in unless it is just a few locations that you can mock up or build. In consideration of the sound man be conscience of the audio levels in the environment as well. You want to have access to and control over any noise (rowdy neighbors, traffic, heaters, air conditioning). You won’t want to have too exterior night shoots unless you plan to loop a lot of dialog in post. Try to consider electrical concerns for the lighting of your set. The location should have plenty of electrical outlets and breakers, otherwise you won’t get the shot lit. If you can’t control these aspects, leave them out of your story.
• Generate multi-layered characters. Do the homework on each character and have it displayed in the story. If the players in your screenplay are not fleshed out they will not jive with viewers and you will lose them quickly.
• If you are looking to make a movie that sells, you will want it to be a genre styled movie. Horror, suspense, science fiction, comedy, or any combination, are generally the most profitable micro-budget movies. Some others would suggest that small groups of characters with personal stories and a small scope are a better story line, but realistically people crave something that they haven’t witnessed before. You can only afford ingenuity. I’ve seen good love stories and dramas on small budgets, but these movies don’t fly off the shelves. We love making movies but we cannot make them for free.
• Gun fights, explosions and squibs are all great, but more often than not they come off lame and tacky. There is also the safety issue. You don’t want to hurt anyone in your cast, crew or even an onlooking fan. A lot low-budget production companies do gun flare in post. This is something I will never do again. It takes forever to motion track, it looks like crap and there is no substitute for the real thing. I prefer blank guns and to possibly enhance the flare in post or don’t put it into the script at all.
• You are shooting yourself in the foot if you create a story that requires a lot of green screen. Try to create something that can be done with real live characters, situations and locations. Do a small amount of digital effects to enhance, but not to repair or as a standalone subject. Otherwise, you or your editor will be sitting in front of your computer editing suite many times longer than it took you to shoot the movie.
• Don’t finish writing until the script is actually done. It is easier to plan the feasibility of a storyline than it is to repair it in the process of production. You wouldn’t want to find out too late that it is too complicated for your cast and crew to keep straight in their heads or even worse something way below their capabilities. If everyone working on the flick thinks that it is intellectually below them, It will be a miserable shoot all around. Some actors may even quit before the end of production and then you will be rewriting out of necessity.

One other big mistakes in writing low budget scripts is to include camera directions (zoom, pan, fade in etc.). I’ll get more into that in a later post. Remember you are only the author at this point. It may be someone else’s job to choreograph the camera movements. Even if you plan to be the director, it is just not the time to focus on details such as camera angles.

Again, these are from my experiences on multiple sets. For some reason I can only learn a lesson completely when it hits me in the face. When it does hit, I can usually trace the problem back to my writing. Remember it’s always the writers fault in a low budget movie.