WHAT DOES A FILM COST IN MONTHS?
A short film’s budget covers the kit, the crew and the edit. It leaves out the months the filmmaker is not earning while making it, and both come out of the same runway.
Ask what a short film cost and the answer is usually a production figure. Kit hire, crew, locations, food, the edit, the grade, festival entries. It is a real number, carefully added up, and it leaves out a cost that can outweigh everything else on the list: the income that stops while the film is being made.
Two budgets
Here is an example, with round numbers. A filmmaker has £7,000 she can use. Her costs are £1,500 a month. Shifts bring in £800 a month, confirmed. Her money goes down by £700 a month, so her runway is 10.0 months.
The film’s budget is £2,000. Taken out of what she has, that leaves £5,000, and a runway of 7.1 months. On that reckoning the film costs 2.9 months.
But the shoot and the edit need three months off the shifts. For those three months her money goes down by the full £1,500. Walk it forward:
TODAY £7,000 10.0 MONTHS PAY THE £2,000 BUDGET £5,000 7.1 MONTHS THREE MONTHS, NO SHIFTS £500 SHIFTS RESTART, £700 A MONTH lasts about 3 weeks RUNWAY WITH THE FILM 3.7 MONTHS
The film costs 6.3 months of runway. The budget accounts for 2.9 of them. The other 3.4 are the shifts not worked, and they appear on no production budget.
Reading the number
Read plainly, 3.7 months says that about three weeks after the shifts start again, the money is gone, unless something else has been booked by then. That is the real deadline the film sets, and it falls well after the wrap party.
None of this says do not make the film. A runway of 3.7 months is a decision that can be made with open eyes. It might mean booking work for month four before the shoot starts. It might mean shooting in two blocks and keeping one shift a week. It might mean the film is worth exactly what it costs, and the answer is yes.
What the arithmetic will not do is stay still. If the edit runs a month long, that month costs £1,500, not £700. If the fee for the next job arrives after the money runs out, it does not move the runway at all. Pricing in a spare month before the shoot is easier than finding one during the edit.
The same two lines hold for a record, an exhibition, a play or a book: what it costs to make, and what stops coming in while it is made.
This is the arithmetic a What If in A Runway To is for: add the budget as a one-off cost, end the shifts and start them again three months later, and read the result against the runway you have now, before anything real changes.
Before locking a shoot date, write the film’s cost as two lines: the budget, and the months of income you will give up to make it. Put both against your runway and read the number that is left. Then decide what month four looks like.