Budgeting

There are a number of approches that you may take when creating a budget.

• You might go line by line through your outline and estimate what each portion of your concept may cost you to produce. (this is not the most efficient method of budgeting as you may not be able to easily guess how your cost savings can mount when grouped with costs of other departments and tasks.)

• Another approach is to use E-One budgeting software to go through each of the possible categories of the production process and estimate whether each category may be involved in your production and then calculate what costs you may require according to your outline and conversations with your production and crew members. 

One big help in the production world is the power of bids or estimates from free-lancers. The film industries work on very efficient understandings of experienced crew members that can take a written or verbal explanation of a concept and deliver a cost estimate after a few short discussions and a look at the places that are intended to be shot. 

 

 

The first thing to think about is the total production goal, and how much money you'll need to meet that goal. Funding might be necessary for equipment, on camera talent, production and post teams, manufacturing, etc.

Consider Data Management

At almost every step along the way of your business pracitices and production process you will need to consider, plan for and execute some type of data management. 

Any component you create in a digital format must be considered volatile and unsafe if it has not been duplicated, copied or backed up in at least two places. Three copies at all times is actually preferred. 

Consider all of your files and raw data. Everything from outlines, scripts and storyboards to images, video and audio that was captured into digital formats as well as any graphical elements along with the project files for their manipulation programs. 

We can never stress this enough: BACK-UP EVERYTHING DIGITAL IN TWO PLACES AT ALL TIMES

No hard drive is bulletproof. Never consider a single copy of a digital file to be safe from data loss.