Your Limitations Are Your Assets
The first thing to consider is how are your action scenes revealing character? Here are a couple of tips on that:
http://www.scriptsecrets.net/tips/tip170.htm
http://www.scriptsecrets.net/tips/tip40.htm
Now to action scenes on a budget - I've written a bunch of them! The key to any scene on a budget is that your limitations are really your assets - so a car chase scene might be too expensive to shoot on your budget - so why not make it a footchase? Or a rooftop chase? You can easily fake jumping from roof-to-roof on a low budget - and you can fake hanging off the edge of a roof on a low budget. Guess what? A man chasing a man is more personal and emotional than a car chasing a car. Cars can become "conflict condoms" - something that comes between the character and the danger. The character interacts with the car, and the car interacts with the other car, and the other car interacts with that other character. By removing the cars you probably improve the scene by getting rid of that "conflict condom".
But if you really want a car chase, you can do it on a budget. Back when I was making movies on Super-8mm and 16mm I did car chases. What you need to do is find a "safe location" for your chase. Extras and closing streets can be expensive - so find an interesting location without people that will be private property. In Walter Hill's THE DRIVER there's a cool chase & "auto hide & go seek" in a warehouse filled with pallets of merchandise. I have a chase scene in one of my scripts in a container yard - a maze. Country roads? Off roads? What "safe location" do you have access to that will make an interesting car chase?
The limit/asset works for shoot outs, too. Gunfire is very expensive on a low budget film. You need a weapons handler, pyro tech, all kinds of people that you have to pay, but they don't show up on screen. So the key is to limit the number of times the guns fire... and that becomes an asset.
In my flick IMPLICATED there was a shoot out scene which was rewritten for budget - now the two guys wrestle for control of a gun. The gun is between them, and each pushes the barrel so that it's aiming at the other's *eye* then prepares to pull the trigger. The other guy pushes it away from his eye and turns the table - pressing it against the first guy's eye. They wrestle with the gun - back and forth - until it fires... against somebody's chest (but we don't know which guy). This meant we never had to have a pyro tech at all (and the gun was a replica - a fake). We just had the SOUND of the gun going off. Then both guys eyes popping wide open. Then one of them falls to the floor, bleeding, and dies.
I think having a gun pressed into your eye socket is more emotional than having someone aim a gun at you from twenty feet away. This was a better scene BECAUSE of the budget limitations.
So - how can you make *limited shooting* into an asset? Maybe give the hero only 5 shells? He can't waste them - needs a perfect shot before he squeezes that trigger? Or maybe have a policeman nearby or have the scene in a public place where firing the guns will bring trouble?
Or maybe find a way to remove the guns from the story - I've written a couple of martial arts flicks where the hero & villain's hands were deadlier than any gun. What if the hitmen specialize in using every day items as weapons? A #2 pencil shoved through someone's eye socket into their brain is gross, inventive, and can be faked on the cheap.
Kitchen & garden = lots of deadly props. Let your imagination run wild. Hands in garbage disposals, fertilyzer in the eyes - there's no shortage of weapons in those two locations.
The key to working on a budget is to use your imagination and turn those limitations into assets.
- Bill
