Everything Watch the Everything trailer

Low budget is not a genre. It is merely a statement of financial fact - a film made for less than whatever is considered the standard minimum amount of money (an interestingly elusive figure, as it happens). However, given the differing logistics undeniably involved, it is surely fair to say that, as a way of filmmaking, low budget does lend itself to a somewhat alternative approach - the more so the further you descend the ladder.

We shot our film, Everything, in nine and a half days and completed it for a total budget of £47,500 - an extreme undertaking by any measure. And yet the overriding creative experience was far more of positives and advantages than negatives and limitations.

For instance, give yourself £5 million and – as irrational as it may sound - the film you make will almost certainly not be shot chronologically. The cast will consequently spend the entire eight or so weeks of the shoot leaping back and forth between wildly differing emotional states and stages of their various story arcs.

We, on the other hand, could simply let our principal players [Ray Winstone and Jan Graveson] pursue their narrative journey together almost entirely as they would in real life; the first encounter genuinely informing the next and so on. (As a matter of interest, everything was also set over nine and a half days.) Not only does this have obvious and exciting performance advantages, it can also be strangely elevating when it comes to the actual storytelling.



Even accepting the enormous time constraints, such an approach will always be far more accommodating to what is surely the real magic of filmmaking – spontaneity and accident. As a way of working it is so much more dynamic and organic than the largely painting-by-numbers approach adopted by most bigger budget productions (inevitable given their much greater risk). Good actors particularly relish it.

Likewise, the film/digital debate need not be viewed solely as a trade-off between image quality and financial expediency. For not only has the rapid evolution of digital technology already significantly reduced the quality gap (we shot everything on High-Def, a medium now fully capable of playing satisfactorily on even the largest of screens), but the ever-present working advantages of tape over film have also been enhanced.

Firstly, a 35mm movie camera will generally hold a ten-minute film magazine (and 16mm isn't really that much different). Not only does this preclude ever running a take of longer than that (always an interesting exercise), but it also forces a break in proceedings at least once every ten minutes of actual shooting. Quite aside from the obvious time waste, such disruption will inevitably result in a much more staccato process.

Conversely, pretty much any digital set-up will come with the facility to shoot for much longer, with some now effectively limitless (recording, as they do, directly on to hard drives). Secondly, and possibly more significant still, a digital filmmaker is completely liberated from the hideous, anti-creative pressure of keeping to a ratio (something that even a £5m movie would still have to endure). Instead he can just shoot to his heart's content.

The room we were shooting in was so small that coming out very wide was never really an option.

But of course compromises do need to be made. Shooting a full-length feature in nine and a half days requires the completion of approximately ten minutes of the finished film every single day. To move from one location to another, however proximate, would effectively write-off a minimum of a quarter of a shooting day, a luxury we just simply did not have. Over 75% of Everything is set in a single room. And although to many this would seem a very limiting cinematic prospect, in actual fact all that's required is the simple transference from one idea of landscape to another.

The human face (and to a lesser extent its adjoining body), with all its topographical features and propensity to dramatic climate shifts, must to a large degree fulfil the role more classically associated with deserts and mountains and oceans. The room we were shooting in was so small that coming out very wide was never really an option. Going in close always was.

In fact, as everything is progressively stripped away in accordance with the demands of the tiniest budget, all that is guaranteed to survive are the people stood in front of the camera. They alone will thereby determine the success or failure of the film - what they do, what they say, how they say it, how they do it and how we show it. In our case particularly, that really was everything.

The Everything DVD is out to buy on Monday 23rd January 2006.

Richard Hawkins | Published 13 January 06

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