Well, first of, atually getting actors to play the roles instead of friends. In this case the whole thing is done around the fact that we do not have actors, so we cannot have acting demanding scenes because they simply wouldnt pull it off. And working with people who arent used to be on camera, makes us having to re-do a lot of shots due to unexperience.
There would also be a huge bump in quality, better camera, better lenses, and a gimbal stabilizer/sliders and what not. Moving to a Black Magic/ Sony FS system, would mean we had 10 bit color science and much more dynamic range, which would be on par with what you'd see in a Rihanna or any other major star music video, because that dynamic range is what gives the video a filmic look. Even though I believe the video itself is somehwat filmic in its grading/colors, this is a very time consuming method, and all shots need to be extensivily graded in order to look this way. With this video (as well as all my others that you can follow here -
https://vimeo.com/156891323 ) everything is shot either handheld or with a shoulder rig, and then digitally stabilized, this creates some creative limitations, because I cannot do fast pans and some other sequences because the digital process would be ruined.
Also lighting, which was severely hurt by the low budget, we were supposed to have 15 lights hanging from the ceilling for lighting/decoration, but that alone would costa round 200-300 and we simply could not spare that much money, so we had to improvise with what we could.
And last but not least, it would grant us acess to other locations, there was a scene where she's leaving her house, that we jumped to a random house and filmed it, in fact, most of our filmings are done in private places, illegally, so we decided to scratch that scene off, since it was likely to give us some trouble.
Im all in favour of making our best with the little of budgets we have, im proud when people can say "it looks professional/high end" when it was actually done with so little money. But having a bigger budget doesnt mean I would spend it just because its there, I would apply it in specific areas that I would think could upgrade the overall quality of the project, yet keeping it as unexpensive as possible. It may not seem like it, but a small bump in the budget, and changing the gear slightly would produce high end content, similar to what we are used to seeing from big stars.
