Documentary Project - Budget

For our project we decided that we would be travelling to another country to get some interviews and some footage of the Berlin Memorial.

Because of this our expenditure per person for the project was quite high, to keep things fair and to prevent people paying more than others I decided to draw up a budget for the project.

I took into account: Plane Tickets (Trine and George paid for luggage), Car Rental, Hotel (Managed to get a place to stay for free), Archive Footage, Fuel, Food and the Narrators expenses.

I added some formulae to work out how much each person will be spending and then added a 20% excess just incase some things are more than we expected that way we can have some leeway and not be caught out.

As it was we were spending at least two hundred per person, however, Trine managed to get accommodation for five days in the Big Mama Hotel for free, which took over a hundred pounds off our total.

I then came up with the idea to make a GoFundMe campaign, which people who were interested in the project could donate to in return for a special thanks and a copy of the film depending on how much was donated.

In a short amount of time we raised over £250 from family and friends which came in very handy as it took about 70 from each of our total expenditure. I incoportated this into my budget and we got a good idea of how much it would cost per person.

---Update---

Something I didn't fully take into account was the expenditure before Berlin as we did a lot of travelling into London and Birmingham, because of this I went through a lot of petrol and we also had to pay congestion charge and parking in London and the toll over Dartford bridge/tunnel.

This meant I had paid around £80 in petrol alone, I was so focused on Berlin as I thought it would be the most expensive however the travel in the UK was more expensive than I thought, In the future, I will make sure to take travel into account.

Making a budget for this project came in very handy though as it allowed for us to set aside how much money we needed, next time I work on a project of this magnitude, however I will have a budget we update regularly as it is likely we didn't pay an equal amount each into the project.