Learn how to plan your film’s time, budget, and production schedule inside the Movie Machine. In this lesson, you’ll discover how long projects typically take, what affects your costs, and how to start small with pilots or trailers before scaling to full-length films. You’ll also learn how to manage your budget with Creatorwood’s pay-as-you-go system, explore self-funding and crowdfunding options, and understand the real-world workflow of turning your story into a finished movie.

Below is the transcript of the session with chapters. Please note that the transcription was done by AI so some inconsistencies may occur.

Introduction to Film Production Time and Cost

Okay. How long and how much will your film take? Now that we know about our pricing, it's time to put our pricing and how long it takes the software to use to now start to understand how much time and money invested can get you a film that you're looking for in the movie machine.

Understanding the One Hour Per Minute Goal

So ultimately, our long term goal is that it takes you one hour of work per one minute of finished film.

This includes everything from story uploading to director's notes, to editing, everything. Within an hour for a minute of finished film. So this, in this example, a hundred minute movie, gonna take about a hundred hours of work. This is our goal. However, your first film will take longer as you learn the platform.

That's okay. And hopefully this course dramatically speeds the time to creation for your first film up. Now, sometimes time will vary. We say roughly an hour, not because this is a formula, and then you press this button, and it gets that. Yes, there's a lot to learn, but.

Dealing with AI Limitations and Adaptations

Some projects take longer because of different complexities, and what I would actually encourage you is if something in the beginning is not working well with the AI, to maybe choose to change that about your story and adapt it just like you would in traditional filmmaking.

If a set's not working the way you want or if a lighting's not working the way you want, for example. And we were recently working with a creator on a story where it was an animal with missing an ear. It didn't have an ear patch, it was just missing the ear. And it looked goofy and it was like cute, and it was supposed to be, part of that character personality.

The problem is these AI models have been incentivized to not have missing ears or missing eyes, right? They're highly incentivized to not do that and not have these aberrations. So trying to get it to do that is extremely difficult to do it consistently and can take longer. So if you're okay with that, great.

But if not, then you could very early on figure out, Ooh, I think this is having trouble with the ai, and then change it. And you could always reach out to a support team too, if you're like, am I doing something wrong? Or is this something that like, might be a little challenging with ai? And sometimes like with how AI works, some of these limitations make sense.

Like once again, if you're trying to have a missing eye, an eye patch is one thing. Eye patch is easy, but having the literal eye not be there is. Much harder to do because again, these models are not incentivized to do that because that would look, that would be something that would be incorrect in most use cases.

So once again, we're constantly improving the platform to reduce these inefficiencies and also make it easier to work with these AI models. But again, story complexity affects these total hours. Likewise, a number of characters in shots. Sometimes if you have four or five characters in shots, like in one shot, it's hard to maintain consistency.

We're working on getting this resolved as well. Two, three characters max do better in shots versus four or five. So that's another thing for you to think about. Do you need 10 characters in every shot? If you do, then you might run into more issues and it might take you longer. So time varies.

But our goal is that it's about an hour a minute for you, and every story has its own little complications, so it's not gonna be also an hour per every scene. It's just if you're writing a story, some scenes are harder. Than others to write. And the same thing is with the moving machine, creating it.

Some scenes will run into more issues than others, but ideally, you're flowing through pretty smoothly, 80 to 90% of the time.

Tips for Your First Project

So for a first project, I recommend you start small trailer cold open. Make a pilot first scene or hook moment ultimately gives you faster learning, lowers the cost, and helps you test audience reaction before committing to a long film.

Some sample timelines here.

Sample Timelines and Budgeting

If you're creating a two to three minute trailer, I think for your first film, I hope you can do it in five to 10 hours, 30 minute short film episode, 30 to 50 hours, a hundred minute feature film, a hundred to 200 hours. Now we can start to think about your timeline based on the hours a week that you can spend on it.

If it's a two to three minute project and you have 20 hours a week, probably can get it done a week. It's a 30 minute project and you have 20 hours a week, probably getting two to three weeks. This is a hundred minute feature. If you have, 20 hours a week, you're probably looking at 10 weeks.

Although honestly, it depends where you're at in the spectrum. If you can do this closer to a hundred hours, you could be looking at closer to five weeks instead of 10 weeks. In terms of budget, this is going to depend on length, and we have our move machine pricing calculator on our homepage. I recommend you use, but ultimately story processing is gonna be.

Right around a hundred dollars. If you're gonna do a hundred minute film, I'm assuming that you have, about a hundred page script or about a full length novel. Characters plus start and end frames. The regenerations and wardrobes will get you about two to $400. This is because you're creating literally for a film of this length, probably 2000 start in end frames 2000 plus.

The expense. It makes sense. You're spending two, $400 in the start in frames 'cause you're literally making thousands of them. Video generation will then net you about $2,000 to that first draft. 'cause we're talking about a hundred minutes, $20 a minute. Regeneration to miscellaneous edits.

I'm thinking, regenerating audio regenerating, this thing might get you another $500, $3,000. So three to $5,000 can definitely get you. A hundred minute film that you're pretty pleased with. That's our goal. And for this in perspective, this is equivalent to the cost of a develops editor for a novel.

It is wild. And again, what's great is that you're not spending this whole budget upfront.

Managing Your Budget Over Time

You gonna do over this over the course of weeks or months because it's pay as you go, you generate. And pay when you do generate so you don't pay ahead of time. And it ultimately makes these large projects financially manageable without upfront risk because you can create a pilot.

Ultimately, you could create the first five to 10 minutes of your film or one to two episodes. You can release it for free or even paid. Start to gather audience traction. And if it gains traction, continue to film. And if it doesn't refine or pivot before investing more. And at Blog Creator Wood TV slash bootcamp, we'll link to it in the description of this lesson.

I have a free bootcamp, five day email course with videos attached that teaches you how to do this pilot process, and I think it's very beneficial.

Funding Options for Your Film

Founding options. There's obviously self-funding, which is pay as you go. You could also do a pilot first, then scale, which the pilot first would feasibly have your viewers start to fund the film, or at least help fund the film and as they pay for it as it's generating.

So you're, instead of you paying as you go, it's almost like your viewers paying as you go. And then there's crowdfunding which is coming soon on Creative Wood, which is when viewers can fund your film by paying upfront before you even generate just based the concept for it. And ultimately, these fans are paying for early access and special awards.

Dealing with Unexpected Movie Machine Behavior

Okay, this is a lot going on here, but now we're gonna dive into one of my favorite topics, which is dealing with unexpected movie machine behavior. I'll see you all there.