filming the monster/demon chase from its own POV in Evil Dead as it chases Ash

Ed wood didn't even hide it, neither did Rodger corman they relished their small budgets and made it their trademark.

Jaws. The use of suspenseful music and low budget anamatronics is done so well.

"marble hornets" is an early YouTube ARG with practically zero budget that used a combination of POV, conservative shaky cam, "Slenderman" camera distortions and basic CGI. (Fun fact, this series is also the origin of the modern Slenderman)

The result is one of the most compelling and interesting amateur films I've ever witnessed

I mean Corman's movies still had great matte paintings and miniatures to create a sense of scale that they couldn't accomplish on such a low budget. Hell even look at the Fantastic Four 1994 movie, it's cheap, but it does the best job possible at trying to make a superhero movie on a $1 million budget. In fact, the Thing costume looks better in that than in the adaptations afterward haha

Yeah but then Corman also did death race 2000. Lol.

It still blows my mind Raimi was in his early 20s (around 20-21) when he directed the first Evil Dead movie. So much of that is so damn creative, natural born filmmaker

That's true, I've never seen it so I can't say much. I will give him a ton of credit for The Trip (1967), the hallucination sequences in that are wonderful for something that cost so little. There's a reason so many filmmakers who worked under him became bigger names afterward, a fantastic teacher. A lot of what Cameron did on The Terminator seems to be a lot of what Corman probably taught him

I used to watch the saw 1 commentary and the way they used that budget always amazed me . I think one cut was them walking from a dungeon set to the police department and it was one take they just moved between a beam or something

Yes Corman and woods were masters of their craft. Ever see plan 9 from outer space? Woods shot that for under a thousand dollars.

The Fountain (2006) was initially supposed to star Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett with a $70M budget. But Pitt ditched for Troy and the project was scrapped. Aronofsky rewrote the script (cutting huge set pieces) and got Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz on board. What was really cool was his use of low-cost macro photography for the space scenes instead of CGI.

The Whale is shot entirely in one room. Sure that helped with the budget.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail's replacing horses with coconuts.

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There's something in The Blair Witch Project that still haunts me, and I don't know if it was discovered in the editing room, or always planned.

A few times throughout the movie, the DAT sound recorder for the 16mm camera is farther away than the person holding said camera. This dissonance is scary, particularly in the final shot. The DAT is on the basement floor and Heather is still holding the 16mm upstairs... so her screams get closer, louder and more hysterical as she descends further down. Yikes.

And doing a literal cop-out rather than have a big fight scene at the end.

I don't think that was low budget at the time, the salt corroded the mechanical shark, the idea of using the barrels as a proxy of the shark attacking was truly innovative.

• Monsters (2010) - original budget of $1.5k. Nobody except two leads knew they were in a movie. Special effects edited by the same guy who shot it, in the course of 2 years.
• Cosmos (2019) - original budget of $0. Shot with the borrowed equipment and savvy fellows who knew a thing or two about radioastronomy,
• Reservoir Dogs - original budget of $15k. You shoot it with a bunch of actor friends in an empty mini-warehouse.

Here's some ideas from the past.

I don't know if there's one specific thing to point out, but Nolan's commentary for Following is great for this stuff. Nearly every shot is economical or for a purpose. The movie was heavily rehearsed so they could film as few takes as possible and thus save on 35mm film costs. He shot the opening framing scene very professionally and static so when the rest of the movie goes handheld, it seems like an artistic choice for the story within a story. The commentary's filled with stuff like that.

It was originally cleverly posted as a one-of-the-first "found footage". If you just read it, and did not read the reviews, subsequently going into a movie theatre with the perception it was an actual documentary - it did hit the right way.

Nah, I knew it was not a real shark, as opposed to Jurassic Park.

I've heard of filmmakers hiding in the bushes during battle or crowd scenes of big budget movies and filming the scenes for their own movies. Gettysburg with Martin Sheen comes to mind.

Also, John Waters used to hide his camera in the back of a van to avoid permits when shooting at public buildings.

Watch James Cameron's masterclass. He used miniatures, reverse projections and matte paintings for future war scenes in terminator, shot in streets with car dealerships so that he had well lit streets at night, and often meticulously planned every shoot so that the budget remains as constrained as possible.

In the Wrath of Kahn, the bridge of the Enterprise and the bridge of the Reliant (Kahn's ship) are the same set with slightly different configuration.

It's adapted from a play so it makes sense that most of it takes place in one room.

Slenderman existed as photoshop images and a creepypasta on the forum SomethingAwful before the excellent Marble Hornets videos came out.

'tis why I specified "modern" slenderman.

He was a simi-obscure art project pre-marble hornets.

For the Dutch historical naval epic Michiel de Ruyter (trailer), which has a massive budget for a Dutch but a small budget compared to an American epic (about $8.5 million), director Roel Reiné juggled three ships around to make it seem like the naval battles on screen had many, many more.

I thought that was because one of the actors was allergic to horses.

Cube is set in a gigantic maze-like cube with thousands of different rooms that have various obstacles the characters have to deal with as they explore, but the movie had a tiny budget so they only built one room.

So what they did was build the room with removable panel walls that were different coloured gels. They simply swapped the panels from scene to scene so some rooms were red, some were blue, etc, and simple camera angles were enough to convince you the characters were travelling through this giant structure. Very cleverly done!

While this is true, the first episode was posted within weeks of the first Slender Man photoshop images being created on SA. Troy Wagner, the series creator, was a part of the original forum thread where Slender Man was cooked up.

Reservoir Dogs was certainly not 15k

Resevoir Dogs - get Harvey Keitel

All the stuff done in El Mariachi. Like if you flub a take you just cut just before it to not have to refilm the first part so you save film..

Primer was done with 7k.

Tarsem Singh was primarily a Commercial Director, a career which took him all around the world.

When he was on location in various exotic locales, he would seek out the most striking environments and then assemble his cast there to shoot a single scene from The Fall. In this fragmented way, he eventually put together a breathtakingly beautiful epic film which feels very expensive --but which was made for just 30-million.

Monsters was Gareth Edward's. Who went on to Direct Godzilla and Rogue One.

....you thought they had real dinosaurs?

It probably started at 15k. I think the budget went up when keitel signed on

Carlos forgot to pay a vendor for a Cocoanut so Rodriquez fixed it with narration..Carlos talked about getting a free Cocoanut.

Which makes the budget of the film more than 15k

I remember learning about how the space ships in Alien where basically Star Wars models/miniatures that were mixed and matched for the external ship shots. And I never would have known if I hadn’t watched that making-of documentary.

Was it ever supposed to be a physical entity though (perhaps that’s because of the budget like you’re saying). I always imagined it as a presence the characters feel rather than see

Resevoir Dogs had a budget of 1.2 million.

1.2 million was the budget for Reservoir Dogs.

Primer looks very low budget

The girl who’s mom goes to college choreographed Napoleon’s dance at the end.

Robert Rodriguez used some really clever jump cut techniques out of necessity in the action sequences of El Mariachi which I only noticed because he pointed them out in the commentary. Of course that is the film that put him on the map.

Speilberg & Cruise decide to not recieve salary for Minority report because Speilberg didn't want the production cost over 100M

Him & Cruise recive 15% from movie total gross around 55M each

Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) had a low budget even by 70s standards iirc & it became one of the largest & easily recognizable horror icon franchises ever. the original film still holds to this day & is underrated as hell. carpenter spent something like 1/3 of the budget on just a free-moving camera dolly that was new tech at that time & had to cut a bunch of corners with the budget bc of it. that risk ended up being the right one. the netflix doc “the movies that made us” did an episode on it & it was super interesting

I thought it was a load of shite. I almost burst out laughing at the end when the whole cinema was just sat staring at a black screen.

The gallop-running gag is so silly but so goddamn effective.

I knew it was fake and it still hit hard.

One of the few horror films to actually scare me.

Didnt have a budget for costumes either. Told everyone to wear a black suit to the set. Tarantino was saying on howard stern that weinstein (yes that one) wanted him to cut the torture scene as well

Doesn't look like 7k tho, which is why it won so many awards.

In Rocky 2 they made a mistake with Rocky’s giant banner and they didn’t have budget to order a new one. Rocky just pointed out the mistake in the movie and that’s how it is dealt with. It was it?

https://screenrant.com/rocky-movie-mistakes-shorts-color/

I've watched El Mariachi more times with commentary than without. It's wonderful.

>"You want to be a filmmaker? I've got good news for you, you're a filmmaker. Now go make movies."

Similarly Carpenter using a steadicam from Michael Myers’ POV in Halloween.

The Thing (1982) using the camp burnt down at the end for the Norwegian camp.

All of Escape from New York

That movie still felt like it was massively expensive. Love it so much.

Saw

Yeah that tends to happen at the end of movies

It was just before the end, when we were supposed to be scared because it was dark.

When Kevin Smith made Clerks he filmed it in black and white and shot it in mostly in the store.