Bad acting sinks many micro-budget films. Jared Isham explains why it happens and how to cast and direct a low-budget film with no bad acting.
One of the big problems with low budget or micro-budget movies is the acting. Not all micro-budget budget films have bad acting but many of them do and for good reason. Acting is hard and, like any craft, takes a lot of practice to become great at and when you are learning your craft you can’t always expect highly skilled, well trained professional actors to want to jump on your project, especially when you have no money. This is a dilemma that even experienced filmmakers face, and it doesn’t always come down to the acting, but more of the interpretation of a character aligning with the vision of the director.
The cost of quality acting puts a lot of us micro-budget filmmakers in a tough spot when it comes to making a film that we hope will compete with more established, well know filmmakers and help us to transform our filmmaking passion into a filmmaking career. I don’t have anything against actors, in fact, I found my passion for making movies from starting off with acting in high school and college. I found that I don’t particularly think I am the best actor, which is why I prefer to do my work behind the camera. Acting is tough and I have mountains of respect for anyone who chooses to step in front of the lens and perform for the world to see. But as a filmmaker, it is sometimes tough to learn how to craft performances that are memorable on screen.
Fortunately for indie filmmakers working on getting their movie made or starting out their career, there is a style of filmmaking that should not be overlooked — documentaries. You may think that it is not really the same thing as a scripted movie. Yes, but storytelling is storytelling and if you are able to learn how to tell a story with a documentary you can use that to make even better movies that are scripted.
Another factor to consider is costs. The saying that practice makes perfect has never been debated as far as I know, but if you consider the expenses that go into making a scripted film you might wonder how you would be able to practice. That is where documentaries come in. If you find a topic to make a documentary about, then start asking for interviews and put them on the calendar. Paying for interviewees for participation is not usually considered necessary and sometimes is frowned upon for reasons of tainting the interviewee’s answers to questions, so you shouldn’t worry about how much it will cost to make a doc. All you need is a camera and you’re good to go. So, you shoot some b-roll, get appearance releases for people that are in your footage and conduct a few interviews and you have the makings of a movie.
By this point, you are wondering what any of this has to do with avoiding bad actors in your film, right? When you interview someone and they are authentically themselves, they are not acting, what they are saying is actually them. When you do this, you have zero bad acting in your film because you have no actors. Use it to study character, to learn how to edit beats and moments into your film, focus on the escalations that the subject faces and at the end you have a film that you can post YouTube, submit to a festival or sell to V.O.D. platforms. The world of film is all about being creative and creativity will allow you to use these little tricks to come up with a new way to tell stories and eventually if you are new to this, you won’t worry about bad acting because you’ll know who to cast in your film that will align with your vision — that’s a topic to discuss.
Related filmmaking guides
- Film directing: getting good performances
- Coverage and the master shot
- Camera angles in film: a beginner’s guide
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