Production Design Tips for High-Concept, Low-Budget Films

Like most indie filmmakers, we started out with big ideas and no money.

Our first short was a 20-minute live-action/animation hybrid. Our first feature, This World Alone, was a post-apocalyptic drama. And our latest, Guacamole Yesterdays, is a grounded, Black Mirror-esque sci-fi story about a device that lets you relive and reshape memories to heal emotional wounds.

We love large-scale genre storytelling, but we don’t have the patience to wait around for “real” money to fall into our laps. We also have an innate, punk rock, DIY, middle-finger-to-the-man attitude about our art. So, we move forward, telling big stories on a tiny canvas. The Sistine Chapel on a postage stamp.

And it’s (mostly) worked out. Both of our films have won awards at festivals across the world. This World Alone was released on Hulu, and Guacamole Yesterdays comes out in June following a limited theatrical run.

But we’ve all seen the bad version of this: the B-movie where a toaster is a spaceship and it pulls you out (just long enough to roll your eyes) more than immersing you. So, how do we pull off science-fiction production design on a budget?

Here are a few lessons we’ve learned along the way.

IT STARTS ON THE PAGE

The most important question for filmmakers to ask themselves is "What do I have access to?" If you write a sci-fi spectacle straight from your imagination, you’re going to struggle to bring that vision to life. Building things from scratch costs money you likely don’t have. But if you start with what’s available (an uncle’s junkyard, a nearby lake house, a neighbor’s vintage car) you’ve already given your production design a head start.

The easiest way to boost your production value is to build your story around what you have.

For This World Alone, we knew we couldn't afford to manufacture a post-apocalyptic world, so we shot in the North Georgia mountains, where rusty cars, overgrown weeds, and jaw-dropping views were already in abundance. This limitation of not having a barren, dead wasteland to shoot in challenged us to imagine a different post-apocalyptic landscape that better fit the themes of the film and gave us a unique visual language—where nature has reclaimed the land.

For Guacamole Yesterdays, we needed a house that a struggling artist would live in. And luckily, Hudson lived in one of those! In fact, he was in the process of buying a new home, so he closed on his new house on a Tuesday, moved on a Wednesday, and we started shooting in his old house on a Thursday (we don’t recommend this for the health of your film or your marriage).

Your location is more important than your camera in terms of making a film feel cinematic. Find a location first and then write to it.

YOUR LIMITATIONS ARE A SUPERPOWER

If you can’t compete with Hollywood on spectacle, you can compete with creativity. Think of your limitations as a superpower. Constraints always push creativity.

We're both designers by trade, so in This World Alone, we used a series of graphic-designed photos and on-screen visuals, combined with voiceover, to help tell the story of the world without having to build expensive sets. It added up to about eight minutes of film that we didn’t have to shoot.

In Guacamole Yesterdays, we incorporated comic book panels drawn by comic artist Shaida Amin to visualize key story elements in a way that felt fresh (and affordable).

These creative solutions ramped up the production design without costing anything but time.

GIVE IT A PURPOSE

It’s cliché at this point, but no less true: your location, setting, and props are characters, too. A room isn’t just a space for actors to act in; it’s part of the story. A prop isn’t just a tool, it can say something about any character that interacts with it.

It’s not about having all the options, but using what you have intentionally. Color, shape, size, complexity, weight, etc, can all be valuable elements of the narrative. Arcs aren’t limited to characters.

Early in the preproduction process of Guacamole Yesterdays, we established a strict color theory for every element of the script. By assigning a triadic color scheme (red-blue-yellow) to our three main characters, we could utilize not just the presence of a character’s color as a device but also a color’s absence. Despite our limited location, we could create two distinct worlds using color: The red-blue for the world of Ames & Franklin and the yellow-red of Ames & The Therapist.

This opened up a whole world of possibilities in visual storytelling at no additional cost. We used discordant colors (green and orange) for objects that needed special visual attention and could use the presence (or absence) of purple to highlight stages of their relationship.

When these kinds of guidelines are set in pre-production, it puts everything on the same track so that every piece can be telling the same larger story.

HIRE PASSION OVER EXPERIENCE

We learned early on that filmmaking is a collaborative effort. Every single person on set brings their strengths and makes the end product what it is. You are nothing without your team. So, make sure you hire (and trust) the right collaborators.

On Guacamole Yesterdays, Matt Brohammer (production designer) and Vii Kelly (prop fabricator) brought decades of experience making big ideas work on small budgets. We trusted them to build the world around the film, and they delivered beyond what we could have imagined.

Brohammer (yes, that’s his real name) comes from a theater background, while Vii had been an FX assistant for a number of indie and Hollywood productions. We couldn’t afford to pay their full rates, but we could elevate their roles, give them more creative control, and provide a larger platform for their work.

Our best hires have always been the people who are most passionate about the project, not the ones with the most experience. Find people who are scrappy, creative, and solution-oriented, and then get out of their way and let them work their magic.

FOCUS ON WHAT’S MOST IMPORTANT

The biggest way we pull off production design on a budget is this: we don’t make movies that live or die based on production design.

If your film relies solely on spectacle to work, you’ll always fall short of the quality audiences are used to seeing out of Hollywood (and most of those don’t work either!). But if you focus on emotion, character, and telling a compelling story, people will be too engrossed to notice the mistakes.

Ultimately, your job is the same whether you have $100 or $100,000: make the world feel lived-in and emotionally resonant. Creativity, resourcefulness, and a little bit of DIY attitude will take you further than any budget ever could.

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Jordan Noel and Hudson Phillips are the director and writer of Guacamole Yesterdays. The film follows a heartbroken woman who, after a painful separation, turns to cutting-edge technology that lets her relive and reshape her memories in a quest for healing. Starring Randy Havens (Stranger Things), Sophie Edwards (This World Alone), and Adetinpo Thomas (Hawkeye). The film is currently in a limited theatrical run and will be released on major streaming platforms on June 24th.