Money is a serious issue for a low budget filmmaker and it plays a big role in the making of a short film. It’s quite a challenge to make a professionally looking picture with home-made equipments (like we saw it in our last post). Obviously you can’t afford to buy expensive softwares, but luckily there are other options as well. You can find some completely legal packages online that can help you through every stage of the filmmaking process, basically for free. Let’s take a look at them!
Lightworks
Lightworks is the number one free software in the field of video editing. It’s an incredibly powerful editing package that is way ahead of all other freebie ones. Lightworks has features that even some of the big packages don’t have without the addition of expensive plugins. As an extra there is a strong community supporting it, so this is only going to get better.
Audacity
Audacity in short is the free equivalent of Pro Tools. If you want like to make a great sound mix that’s going to stand up to the professionals, you will definitely need the powerful tools that Audacity provides. It’s the leading free cross-platform digital audio editor and recording application. Luckily it is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and BSD.
Blender
If the big 3D modelling and animating packages are just out of your budget, Blender is the solution for you. The results that Blender has produced are truly stunning and it has already been used to create effects for feature films as well as animated shorts. It can be used for modeling, UV maping, texturing, rigging, water and smoke simulations, skinning, animating, rendering, non-linear editing, compositing and creating visual effects. It is truly impressive and because of its heavy reliance on shortcut keys it’s an ideal software for beginners as well.
Next time we will give you some more freebies. We hope that you found this post informative and inspirational. Please, leave a comment anyway. Good luck to all low-budget filmmakers and don’t forget that there are no more excuses of not doing a short!
The event, which is in its second year, is a forum, festival, conference and graduate training workshop. It aims to bring together French, Danish, Hungarian and UK directors and producers with young film-makers.
