Videomaking Worth Sinking Your Teeth Into And Other True-Life Tales of the Fiction Set

Want to make a movie? No problem. All you need is $15 million, Gene Hackman, and some Hollywood friends. Or you could fire up your camcorder and call some less-famous friends. The latter method should reduce the budget by several million-nearly $15 million, actually. My first video feature, Love Bites, was produced for less than $300.

Even using video, producing a feature on a near nonexistent budget requires a lot of creative cost management. Three quick tips: beg, borrow, buy and return.

Your thrift can't start too early. Every feature begins with a script. An excellent script costs no more than a terrible one. So I set out to write a script every bit as good as-if not better thanithose in Hollywood. A good script can compensate for a low budget/low-tech production, but no amount of money can turn a bad script into a good video.

Know Thyself

Of the 17 months spent making Love Bites, five were consumed creating the script. Once I got the idea for a vampire feature, I immediately considered two questions: Was it a script I could write? Was it a script I could produce?

To answer the first question I had to assess my screenwriting skills and my knowledge of vampires. I realized didn't know much. They say you can only write what you know, so I was at a big disadvantage. Fortunately, there's a cure for ignorance: research.

I wanted to tell the story of a young vampire-one about 50 years old. Since becoming a nosferatu in college, she's had some difficulty completing work on her degree. Thirty years and almost as many schools later, she's still trying.

I spent a couple of months researching Vlad and his ilk. I read several books, including, of course, Bram Stoker's Dracula-the bible of vampire literature. I watched more than 30 vampire movies, from Nosferatu (1922) to NearDark (1989).

I noticed some conventions within the genre and learned what to avoid from watching what's been done. I was also able to consult an acquaintance, a professor, who was an expert on vampires. After awhile-and some inspirations of my own-I decided, yes, this was a script I could write.

But was it a script I could produce? If not, I'd be wasting my time. I knew the budget had to hover close to zero, so I'd have to avoid faraway locations and special effects I couldn't do myself-cheaply. That's why I gave up on my two-headed people from Uranus script.

My vampire story was set at a college because I was living at one at the time. Besides, its Gothic architecture was both appealing and approp…