Be sure to check out Parts 1-4 of Production Planning to learn about basics such as the production pipeline, budget analysis and production planning.

All images from Inspired 3D Short Film Production by Jeremy Cantor and Pepe Valencia, series edited by Kyle Clark and Michael Ford. Reprinted with permission.

What To Do if Your Financial Bid is Too High
If you run the numbers and your cost estimate is beyond what you can afford, don't throw in the towel just yet. There are several possible solutions to the problem of an over-inflated production budget.

• Raise more cash

• Simplify your intended cinematic vision

• Take more time

• Lower your production costs

Raise More Cash
Is it possible to increase the amount of money you can spend on your production? If you are a hobbyist working at home, perhaps a friend or relative might be willing to make a donation. Consider a part-time job. Take out a personal loan or borrow from a credit card. See whether any software or hardware companies might be willing to sponsor a filmmaker who is using one of their products. Such scenarios are rare, but they are possible. If your production costs fall under the category of art/film school tuition, can you get scholarships, financial aid or student loans?

Simplify Your Intended Cinematic Vision
As we've mentioned many times, simplicity in design and execution are worthwhile goals for a CG short. Minimizing the complexity of your proposed film idea can significantly lower your production costs by allowing you to reduce your team size, use less powerful (and less expensive) software and hardware, delete unnecessary production steps and even do without certain equipment that you had previously thought you would need. Simplifying your film idea will also shorten your production cycle, which will mean less money spent on potential teammate salaries, upgrades, repairs and technical support fees. If you are working on your short as a full-time endeavor between jobs, the shorter your production cycle, the sooner you can go back to work and replenish your savings account.

If you plan to use dialogue, carefully consider whether you can possibly tell your story silently instead. Doing so will save you money and time because you will no longer have to find or hire voice actors, schedule recording sessions, utilize audio equipment and software, model phoneme face shapes and perform lip-synch animation. If your story absolutely needs words, perhaps you could use narration instead of actual dialogue. This option will still require voice actors and audio equipment, but phoneme face-shape creation and lip-synching will not be necessary. Or, if appropriate for your story genre, consider silent-film-style dialogue cards or even comic-book-inspired word balloons.

Can you reduce the length of your story? Delete unnecessary scenes and make sure all existing story points are told efficiently. The shorter your film, the shorter your production cycle.

Can you tell your story using fewer characters? Each character in your film needs to be modeled, rigged and animated. Are you absolutely certain that you need to show every single animal species in your Noah's Ark story? Surely you can leave out a few dozen or so.

Will you be able to render all of your scene elements in single passes, thereby removing the need for a compositing stage?

Can you simplify your characters and background elements so they take less time to build, animate and render? Perhaps your goofy cartoon alien works just as well with three fingers instead of five. Maybe you don't need to actually model every single tree. Look into instancing or using 2D cards or background plates instead (see Chapters 13 and 20).

Take More Time
Although lengthening your production cycle might very well end up costing you more, giving yourself more time might actually save you some money. You might be able to get away with half as many teammates if you give yourself twice as much time to complete your film. Also consider that rendering times can eat up a substantial portion of your schedule. Although you can indeed decrease these times with RAM and CPU upgrades, doing so can be costly. On the other hand, if your schedule is long enough to accommodate slower rendering times, you might be able to get away with weaker and less expensive equipment. Giving yourself an extended deadline might also mean that you can spend fewer hours per day on your short, thus allowing you to simultaneously work a full- or part-time job to offset your production expenses.