How We Made Twelve Grams

Like anything everything starts with an idea and we drew influences from a lot of places. I know both Matt and I have always wanted to do an edgy film based on Urban Life. We knew that we wanted to aim it and more our age group whilst maintaining the features of a 18 rated film.

Drawing influences from songs and other film we then started to sketch up a plan and wrote out a screenplay, which we worked on for a good month. After everything was done we knew we needed funding. After gaining a small amount of money from a private business we thought we were ready to shoot. However, after the first shooting day we were out of money and needed to start a Kickstarter. We asked for £5,000 and with Kickstarter this meant crowd funding. Posting the page on every piece of social media we managed to fund that amount within a week and we could start filming again. However, with Kickstarter there comes a return policy. Funders get something back from their investment, our main return being a DVD copy and a poster once the film is complete. (We have no started to ship those to customers. Edited: 14th April)

After all the money had come in we returned to filming and eventually post production. When it came to actors we had some friends from school we knew could fit the roles of the characters and just built a character around them. We in fact worked with them while writing the script making it easier for them to build the character.

After we finished filming and post production we needed a distributer, luckily a family friend works for a low cost distribution company so that was not a problem and didn’t eat into much of the remaining budget. With the publicity of the competition at the Little Picturehouse we had an audience.