Micro-budget horror films vs. microbudget action films.

[IndiePaul]

Great post ItDonnedOnMe.

These people are very very good, and it's a lot more than one. Plus many are industry pros.

Their website states:

The Stunt People are a growing group of martial artists, acrobats, stuntmen, and stuntwomen who perform in films (and make their own films) out of the San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA. They sport multiple ethnicities, body types, and martial arts backgrounds.

No offence to harmonica44 but a lot of his pro-micro-budget-action threads (not just this thread!) very much missed the complexity, cost, difficulty, safety-issues and talent (very very skilled) involved in doing scenes like this.

I would love to see some behind the scenes vids from the The Stunt People showing the crews involved in producing their vids - their talent is obvious, and they obviously have plenty of skill and experience too. If they were charging out like they would doing their industry work, the costs of producing these vids would quickly spinning-back-kick speed away from micro-budget action.

 

[ItDonnedOnMe]

Some of them are pros now - but I think for most of them that grew out of the work they've done as part of SP.

They have quite a few behind-the-scenes clips from Death Grip on their youtube channel. This one's a good example of underestimating what action like this takes to do well - it's from this fight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuWMnZugFzU

And this is the shooting of one shot in that fight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoF6qjeOans

About 40 takes - plus of course the time they put in beforehand choreographing and rehearsing it - for one shot.

But this one's also informative too - it's just about shooting a non-action scene at a museum. But the writer/director/star reveals that they spent the previous day running all over the place to shoot a bunch of scenes because they never made a shooting script and figured out how to do it most efficiently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1zEeEe2xNk

I think that makes it pretty clear that they're not a hollywood crew - even after years of doing this stuff on their own they are still learning how to do things as they go.

 

[IndiePaul]

Some of them are pros now - but I think for most of them that grew out of the work they've done as part of SP.

Got to respect that. Good on them.

 

[ChimpPhobiaFilms]

A lot of indie filmmakers believe in making horrors rather than action since action is harder to do.

Both are hard to do. Action often requires money and creative thinking. To create a good horror film, you have to have suspense, interesting characters the audience cares about, and good scares. Those three things take skill, practice, patience, and a good script to pull off.

But I think making a microbudget action film is just as do-able possibly. I mean look at high budget horror compared to low budget horror. Which would be like Sleepy Hollow compared to Paranormal Activity.

I don't think Paranormal Activity is a good example. That is a found found footage film, which is allowed to have poor continuity, camera movement, and overall quality.

One had a lot of special effects, and the other had to compromise. Look at high budget action compared to low, such as True Lies compared to El Mariachi.

El Mariachi was made over 20 years ago in Mexico in a village where cops give out 20+ machine guns and a jail for film credits AND it was before all of these school shooting and other violent events.

So why is that a lot of indie film makers seem to think that action is un-doable when you can just shoot it very low budget.

They don't think it's un-doable. They just want to save themselves a huge headache and major issues. El Mariachi is a terrible example.

Unless a lot of audiences prefer to low budget horror as oppose to low budget action.

There's an audience for horror and for action. For me, it matters if the film is done right. I will watch a good horror film over a terrible action film, and a good action film over a terrible horror film.