Psst – want to get into moviemaking? Just get hold of a digital camera, take out a bank loan, and become a guerilla.

Guerilla filmmaking, especially prevalent in the West, could be the first movie-making trend of the century. The emergent fad – which West Coast industry watchers say has burgeoned over the last five years – reeks of the ethos familiar to fans of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney movies: ‘putting the show on right here.’

Economic guerillas, the filmmakers behind these shoestring projects, find ways to do a $100,000 job for $10,000 by way of negotiation, deferrals, having the nerve to secure resources gratis, and sheer frugality. These filmmakers – ferocious self-promoters out to create a career – usually aim to prove themselves with their initial work and get the chance to tackle the bigger budgets later.

One such filmmaker is Kellie Benz, who has proved herself all the way into a television series. She describes guerilla filmmaking as ‘all handshake deals, fast shooting schedules and voluntary crews.’

‘Guerilla filmmaking suggests that you have no permit, no okay from the city, and have gone ahead and shot your film [anyway]. Remember the scene from Ed Wood where they run out on to the street and get the shot and run away again? That was guerilla filmmaking.’

‘Permits cost a lot of money, and if you’re shooting on city streets you have to pour money into a police presence and get the okay to shut off traffic, so peripheral things like that cost, too. For low-budget filmmakers, if the script demands you shoot on a city street you have to find a way around it.

‘You end up being nicer to the neighbors than normal; sending over a production assistant to ask them to shut down their lawnmower [for example].

‘Our philosophy is all about saving money.’

Benz’s tenacity appears to have paid off, in the form of the series Skullduggery for The Comedy Network. On the strength of her first film, Second Coming, she was invited to pitch ideas for a series to Comedy.

The film, which ‘wouldn’t have been attractive to any funding agency,’ was shot on a budget of $8,000, which Benz ‘slowly but surely paid off over the year’ with the help of a part-time job. ‘And it’s ended up going to festivals around the world and was on the Comedy Network for three years.’

Skullduggery – which was shot with all the relevant permits, Benz hastens to point out – was made for less than $500,000, with all six episodes shot in less than 25 days using block shooting.

‘We combined roles. Our camera assistant was also our focus puller. Our dop was also our operator. We pretty much combined roles everywhere to keep the roles down. And we all had to move like crazy to get the shoot done, so we all ended up bonding.

‘We hope to do another 13 [episodes] and we will know about that soon enough. We’re very hopeful it will happen and we’re looking forward to doing it again,’ says Benz. Skullduggery has received lfp approval for funding of 13 more eps.

‘Keep in mind we will have had the experience of the first six episodes [when we shoot the second season].

‘My personal take on it is that everyone has to learn how to do it somehow. A lot of people do it on their own money and that gives them the opportunity to make their own film. I learned a lot on Second Coming and I would repeat that experience any time. There’s only one way to learn.’

Renee Giesse, producer/partner at Vancouver’s Miridien Filmed Entertainment, speaking from the set of the company’s low, low-budget black comedy Salvadore’s Deli, mentions production being thrown into chaos by the objections of a single resident of the area in which they were shooting. Without the permission to extend their shooting curfew, two whole days would have had to be tacked on to the shooting schedule – a huge increase in expense for a small-budget shoot.

‘Those are the challenges that we are constantly faced with,’ says Giesse. ‘It’s so funny when you look at larger productions in the city that have the financial assets to throw at these problems. If we had a larger budget we could have put people up in hotels. But our budget is very modest. We had a couple of nights where we lost shots because we had to be out by a certain time. We just had to be creative. Sometimes you’re able to do what you want, sometimes you’re not. The question is how do you get around that?

‘That’s where the director is of immense importance – are you able to work around the challenges of having a location yanked? You have to look at alternatives. Can you take the original vision and make those changes really quickly?’

And locations are only the start of it.

Says Giesse, ‘When you’re dealing with small budgets, stuff like this arises in every department. You have to work out a way to dress a set on the fly: some people can pull something out of nothing. Even scheduling: that might have to change because of other things. Like we have an actor working on deferral and working another job to pay the rent and he arranged time off to shoot and then the shoot had to be canceled. We had to work around that somehow.’

Plainly people are paramount. ‘You need to have a good crew,’ says Giesse. ‘It’s like family – everyone works together. [The partners] are the first ones to grab stuff. If you only have an hour to get the shot, no one has the luxury of being a prima donna. Our wrap parties are great because everyone has done everyone else’s job.’

Other can-do solutions include having the entire crew on deferral and using house power. Giesse says, ‘The dop has to live with it, so does the gaffer, so does everyone. Less lighting means more creativity in how you’re going to light stuff. The dop looks at the rushes every night and says, ‘I wish I could do that differently,’ because there’s not the lighting. Of course, it looks great to me. It’s very interesting how people manage to make it work.

‘The drive is to get to the next level. With any profession you want to be as good as you can be.’