How low should a work be to count as No Budget

I say this because a lot of examples on No Budget seem to be misuses, but I would like to be sure.

I'm seeing a lot of works that would qualify as low budget, which may or may not count as this. Others are works which actually had money, but not as much as they were hoping for.

So do they fit, or does this need cleanup?

What's little money depends entirely on what you compare with. A Hollywood A-film would have a low budget with what a bunch of students making a college film could only dream about.

The trope is supposed to be when you basically have pocket money and scrape by through various money-saving schemes. I'd be inclined to require descriptions of what they actually did with the budget they had and what they did to make up for what they didn't have. A sum of money by itself isn't context enough.

Another Duck pretty well covers my thoughts on the subject.

Yeah, that is pretty much what I thought it should be as well. And too many of the examples just don't fit.

Which ones?

Some of them though in the animation section should be more about shortcuts, cuts, low numbers of frames per second and such.

Well the animation section is one of the worst. Don't even think Brave Little Toaster should count.

A specific number will be worthless because everything's relative. Even movies with 200+ million have to be careful with their budget allocation, it's very easy for it to get out of hand.

A 60 million dollar action movie has budgetary concerns compared to a 150 million dollar blockbuster. A 5 million independent comedy has to do things differently to the 50 million A-list mainstream comedy.

I think the crux of No Budget is that there is a distinct desire to do something more but they can't. It isn't "make do with what we have" but very literally "we can't do what we want." So it depends on the work in question.

I think that No Budget is about an aesthetic that comes from making do with what can be scrounged rather than being able to afford the sets and the costumes and the special effects that works with a budget can manage. If you can afford effects and sets and costume designers, you probably aren't working with No Budget.

So say if you have those, but lose them in the middle of production, that's more an example of Troubled Production than this?

Well, yeah, it would be really missing the point of the trope to count Waterworld, for example.

What? That totally fits. They could barely even afford dirt making that film.

No Budget is not a trope, not as the page is currently typed.

No budget is when you've ran out of money, but found a way to put something out anyway. ECW had more budget than Ring of Honor at least until ROH's Sinclair purchase but burnt through it all.

Alternatively, no budget is when you literally don't have one but are expected to put something out anyway. Sinclair didn't give ROH a broadcast camera for nearly two years yet expected them to produce broadcast worthy television. As a result, their TV show looked worse than those of companies with much less revenue like Ohio Valley and Wrestle1, because they at least had money for production set aside.

Well, it's probably trivia.

That's why it's listed as trivia already.

Well would it be okay to start cutting bad examples?

Cutting bad examples is always a thing that you are allowed to do.

Exactly what are you chopping though? We seem to have very different opinions on what works had no budget, at least in the animation department.

No Budget and Low Budget probably need a line drawn between them. EDIT: the latter probably needs to exist first actually...

edited 9th Apr '15 2:57:44 PM by Memers

Well even before writing up that trope, what are the hard lines you think make up No Budget? We could include them in the description (which might need rewriting anyway, since text is cheap, so makes a poor Self-Demonstrating Article).

No Budget: Created by 2 guys in a basement using an iPhone camera with no costumes or anything else like that as no one had the money for it. The big Indie Game stereotype would be this IE Cave Story, although there are Indie Games with a budget and a team like Bastion.

Low Budget: would be well low budget, cheap costumes, handicam, stock footage, special effects failure. Animation wise it would have looping animations, Stock Footage, low frame rate, lots of Off-Model, lack of movement, and such. Pretty much everything you would notice while watching a Hentai anime, all of which have very little in the ways of budget.

I say obviously off-the-shelf or very cheaply made costumes still count as No Budget. This is the style of the two main Shows Within A Show in The Reviewers. One show is a guy in a basement wearing a Dracula costume you can get at any party store, and the other is a guy passing off a tin foil hat as a helmet (his car is his spaceship) and his nemesis is a sock worn on a hand (yes, a sock puppet that's literally just a sock).

edited 12th Apr '15 3:10:30 PM by DragonQuestZ

Yeah I guess something store bought at a Halloween store would count as no budget.

Also, does Cave Story really count? Aside from the 8-bit style graphics and music, that game didn't seem to be held back by lack of money.

It did take 5 years to make and if he had a budget he would have been able to pay someone to help make the game faster.

But yes some works with No Budget actually make it work or even thrive on it like say The Blair Witch Project. Many of the Garage Indie Games themselves for example sell for much cheaper or even free simply because they don't have the budget to pay for and all that was invested was time. Those that actually had a team and such would fall under Low Budget unless say it was a healthy Kickstarter Funded Project or backed by an actual publisher.

edited 12th Apr '15 4:04:39 PM by Memers

If you can make up for the little money with time and patience, does that really hold back the final product?

Well then again that's me thinking this is "costs almost nothing and looks like it", but that could fall into YMMV territory. If it's a hard line of "done with almost no money, even if it doesn't always look like it", then that does work.

edited 12th Apr '15 4:05:33 PM by DragonQuestZ

Wonder if the movie reviewed here (a homemade remake of The Terminator) counts.

edited 12th Apr '15 4:15:52 PM by DragonQuestZ