leichtloeslich wrote:Clearly I have no idea what amount of money goes into a project like this, but seriously? 8000 dollars for a video project promoting a game much less popular/well known than chess?
The only cost-point I really see is that you need to rent cameras for some time. That's it. Then of course it would be nice if we could get Brad Pit or Johnny Depp for this video, which will mostly be viewed by western nerds (friends of nerds tend to be nerds. I think it's infectious), but what can you do?
For one thing, renting professional quality cameras is insanely expensive. You can rent a "cheap" RED camera for about $500 a day in the US, I have no idea what it would cost in Europe, but it would almost certainly be more expensive. Let's assume that it isn't more expensive, however, but you'd probably want at least a couple of cameras for a project like this. So two cameras, $500 a day, that's $1000 a day. Assuming the project only takes a two days to film then, yes, you have money to spare. So far you've only spent $2000.
But what about the fact that a bunch of people are putting in time to do this? Don't they deserve to get paid? Yes, some people want to promote go for no other reason than to promote go, but other people like to be paid for their services. While Germany has no minimum wage laws, we can assume that those involved in the project would like a fair wage. Let's give them $8 an hour, a bit above US minimum wage - to work 20 hours each on the project. That's $160 a person. How many people are involved? 15? So that's another $2400.
Now what about props? Costumes? I suppose you don't need to go crazy on that, but you can easily spend a few hundred. Let's say these guys are frugal. $250. And their crowdsourcing page said they wanted to provide food for their workers. Catering isn't cheap, unless you want them to make a McDonald's run, so there's another $250.
Ah, but the project isn't just about the filming. What about pre-production? You need people to write, scout for locations to film, hire and interview actors and set people. They might like to be paid, so how about a couple of them get $300 for putting 20 hours into that. What about the post-production work? Video editing software to make professional quality projects. We'll assume that we want everything to be on the up-and-up (no Dread Pirates here) so let's see how much with the most basic AVID software runs... Impressive. Another $1000. And I'm guessing the editors want to be paid too, so let's give them another $300 for their work.
That's just $6500. This project should have $1500 to spare! Of course I'm giving low estimates for everything, especially the wages, and I'm not accounting for things like their website and retroactively paying the expenses of their crowdsourcing effort and so forth, but let's say it came down to $6500.
My best friend was a film student at my college and he has told me many stories of how even the best planned film projects end up with problems. He worked on a 35mm project in college where they were budgeted a small amount of film. As in they were given X amount of film and told that was all they could use. When some of the film was damaged accidentally they actually had to cut out a scene. But this isn't a college project and thankfully, if this budget is accurate (I guarantee you it isn't) then hurray! If something goes wrong the whole project isn't ruined.
Filming anything of professional quality is very expensive. When I saw their budget was $8000 my question was not "Why do they need that much?" it was "Why don't they need more?"
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