Filmmaking is an art form. It’s easy to forget that when we get caught up in corporate gigs and commercial projects. That pays the bills, sure, but it can sometimes feel pretty far removed from what most likely got us into filmmaking in the first place.
Still, if you’re ever in a rut, we think the best way to find a creative spark is to watch some short films that can truly inspire. And over the years, there’s been no place better than here on Vimeo with our Staff Picks.
While the Staff Picks catalog covers a wide range of genres, styles, and production values, low-budget or no-budget projects from thrifty filmmakers have a special place in our hearts. These films come from the purest of thoughts and feature the most innovative forms of artistic communication.
So, for those looking for inspiration or insights into bootstrapped filmmaking styles, here are some of our favorite low-budget Staff Picks, which showcase unique voices, imaginative filmmaking techniques, and original storytelling at its best.
A few of our fave low-budget Staff Picks
Ranging from comedy to animated documentary, let’s look at how these different Staff-Picked shorts use minimal filmmaking techniques and economical aesthetics to tell funny, meaningful, and, at times, dramatically poignant stories.
“ Willem Dafoe”
It doesn’t get any thriftier than this comedy short from Kristoffer Borgli. Shot on what appears to be a 90s or early 2000s camcorder, “Willem Dafoe” is a nice look into how filmmaking doesn’t require huge budgets or even the latest cameras and gear.
The lo-fi aesthetic combines with the one-note premise to create a short film that somehow feels both timeless and very relatable. Who hasn’t been there with a thought — or, in this case, the name of a particular actor — stuck on the tip of their tongue?
Moving even more into the homespun art space, the short documentary film “Now I Know Where to Find You” is a translated version of Diego Berakha Otal’s short “Ahora ya sé dónde encontrarte” that tells a simple story about exploring childhood memories and travel presented through a journey wandering around with Google Maps.
Mixing screen recordings of Google Map searches and home video clips, the short provides a compelling example of how to tell a story beautifully with extremely limited resources.
When working in film and video, there are likely to be many instances where you need to shoot test footage with different cameras. For many, this could be a mundane task not worth much effort.
However, in the short documentary film “Camera Test (King Cadbury),” filmmaker Charlie Shackleton proves that even a premise as innocuous as a camera test can be fertile ground for telling a story, exploring a memory, and strengthening a relationship.
Another project that appears to have been shot on a lo-fi camcorder, the documentary short “I think this is the closest to how the footage looked” by filmmaker Yuval Hameiri, is a beautiful exploration of one’s connection to the past.
As with many of these shorts, the DIY aspects of the project really help connect the viewer more directly and timelessly with the filmmaker and their unique story and voice. The film’s charm is aided by its voice-over narration, sound design, and overall original approach to visual storytelling.
Moving perhaps even further away from what one usually thinks of when they talk about filmmaking, the experimental documentary short “Hardly Working” by the self-proclaimed “pseudo-marxist media guerilla” Total Refusal is captured entirely inside the world of the video game Red Dead Redemption 2.
Intending to explore and practice strategies for artists' invention in contemporary video games, “Hardly Working” continues Total Refusal’s ongoing experimentation into what stories can be found and told in the games we play.
One genre of filmmaking that could be called the most DIY has traditionally been animation. While animation is by no means cheap and quite labor intensive, it is one form of artistic expression that can be done completely by one person.
The animated documentary short “Brontosaurus” is a great example of a true do-it-yourself animated project. It was written, directed, and animated by Jack Dunphy and employs many creative techniques and ideas that make solo animation possible. It also takes a very personal and honest look at a short relationship from a unique perspective.
With the simple premise of asking a six-year-old what a movie should be about, Bianca Giaever's experimental short film “the Scared is scared” is another inspirational example of what filmmaking can be. As an open-ended thought experiment and an exercise in low-budget filmmaking, the entire story is dictated by the imagination of a young kid.
The result is a film that is truly unburdened by the years of preconceived notions about what a film should be to be considered true. It’s a great reminder that filmmaking, like art itself, can be fun and imaginative to its core.
Moving even more into the experimental and the comedy of the absurd, the short “Delta Airline Saftey Video” is an abstract stream-of-consciousness-style project that pokes fun at airline safety videos and the rules and regulations we follow in everyday life.
There’s something refreshing about watching short films that feel disconnected from filmmaking norms yet can still be humorous and pointed toward abstract situations and feelings we experience every day.
“Moomin”
Screen recordings of online interactions created another experimental documentary-style project. The short film “Moomin” by Zach Dorn follows an attempt to fulfill a promise to an ex-girlfriend in Canada.
The film is recommended to be best viewed on a smartphone as it’s shown in a vertical format and is presented as a retracing of a relationship as told through memories, videos, and conversations saved on a phone.
Finally, another perhaps underexplored genre of filmmaking is the found-footage approach, which we see an excellent example of with “They’re Only Animals” by Matthew Palmer. The film features a series of found-footage clips centered around the pageantry of various turkey-related events over the years.
Without voice-over or narration, the clips are edited together in a way that still tells a story and is able to elicit some quite powerful emotional responses to what — at the time of the events — were considered normal festivities.
If you’ve been feeling a bit stuck (as many of us often do), hopefully, these short films have given you some inspiration and perhaps even sparked some ideas of your own to go out and start working on your own projects and films.
