Odie: what shooting a feature in Texas taught me about the budget.

You want to know whether I've actually done it, or whether this site is a brochure written by somebody who has read about it. Fair. Here's the answer: one feature, small, this year, in Austin, with my name on it as director and producer. Odie wrapped its Austin shoot in early June. Here is what it taught me about a Texas budget, in first person, because these are my lessons and nobody else's.

Catering was the line item that surprised me.

It surprised me by being cheap and by mattering more than anything else on the page. In Austin you can keep the catering cost low, and you can feed a crew so well they don't mind the midday sun. Those are the same sentence. The city is full of good food, and a lot of it comes on a truck that will park where you tell it to. I got more out of the crew for what I spent than on any budget line I can name, because a crew that ate well at one o'clock is still a crew at five.

The lesson isn't "catering is cheap in Texas." The lesson is that in a hot state the catering line is a morale line, a safety line and a schedule line, and it's the cheapest of the three to fund.

Transportation is what I'd budget differently.

More vehicles. Specifically, more vehicles that let people get out of the sun on location. I'd add a dedicated bus with the air running, parked at base camp, for the whole day, every location day, and I'd stop thinking of it as a transportation cost and start thinking of it as the thing that keeps the schedule from sliding at two in the afternoon.

A Texas summer exterior is a real physical event. Shade structures help. Water helps. A cold bus with a door helps more than both, and it costs less than the half day you lose when the crew is slow because it's over a hundred.

What Texas gave me that another state wouldn't have.

The word I keep landing on is friendly, and I mean it as a budget line, not a mood.

I've worked in production cities where a neighbor's phone call is a negotiation. Somebody calls the police, the police come, and a conversation happens about what it would take for the phone not to ring again tomorrow. That conversation has a price, and it's never in the budget.

On Odie we were shooting exteriors at night and three police cars stopped over the course of the shoot. Not one officer asked to see paperwork. All three asked what the movie was about and whether we needed anything. I'm not telling that as a story about enforcement. It's a story about a place that likes movies and isn't looking for a reason to stop one.

The business owners were the same. The people who own the shops and bars in Austin live here because it's an arts town, and a film crew on the block reads to them as a good day, not a nuisance. When a location says yes on the first call because the owner likes movies, that's a savings you can't put on a line but you'll feel it on every location day.

What I'm not going to tell you.

I'm not publishing the budget or the day rates. What I'll say is that the crew was paid like professionals, that the deal structure was an independent-film structure, and that anyone who wants to talk about how a small feature gets made in Texas can ask me directly. The numbers belong to the people who worked for them.

What it adds up to.

A Texas budget for a small feature is not a discount budget. It's a budget where a few specific lines behave differently: food is cheap and powerful, transportation is worth more than it looks, and the friction that other cities charge you for in a hundred small ways mostly isn't here. That last one is the biggest number on the page and it never appears on the page.

If you're bringing a show here and want the version of this that applies to your schedule, the producers page is where that conversation starts. If you're a Texas filmmaker making your own first feature, the filmmakers page is the same conversation from the other door. For what the phone call to a local actually buys you, read the producer of record, and for where the state stands in for somewhere else, where Texas doubles.