The budget of a film can heavily affect the production practices. More money available means that the company can afford to hire more famous actors and use better locations. There is also a vast difference in what marketing is available to the makers of the film.
A good example of a high budget film is The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight had a budget of around $185 million and therefore had enough money do almost whateever it wanted.
As you can see just by watching by the trailer, almost all of the actors featured are easily recognisable and are famous in their own right, not just for appearing in this film. To get actors of this calibre, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart and Gary Oldman to star in the film, the production company would have to pay large amounts of money to them as their salary.
In terms of technology, a high budget gives the makers of The Dark Knight a good advantage, as they can use cutting-edge technology to film the movie. For instance, the director Nolan used and IMAX camera to film certain sequences, such as The Joker's first appearance in the film. This would have cost a lot more to do, on top of all the other cameras being used. However, the end quality of the film would be much higher than a film with a smaller budget.
Location-wise, the makers could pretty much film whereever they wanted around the globe. For instance, they used large sections of Chicago to film Gotham City, as well as filming in England and Hong Kong for one section of the film.
The marketing for The Dark Knight was unusual in the way that as well as the usual marketing such as posters and trailers, they also used a large amount of viral marketing to get people involved with the film's release. Warner Bros. reportedly spent over $100 million on marketing, which most other films would not get at all.
At the other end of the spectrum there are very low budgets films such as This Is England, which had a meager budget of £1,500,000. This affected the production practices heavily in comparison.
The actors in This Is England; Thomas Turgoose, Joe Gilgun, Andrew Shim, Vicky McClure, Stephen Graham, are relatively unknown and you probably would have not heard of them before seeing the film, unless you had previously seen similar films with them in, though like the actors, the films were probably not that well known either.
The technology available to the makers was very limited due to the budget that could be used. They only had the standard equipment available and had to film on location as sets would have cost too much to make.
The makers were only backed by FilmFour and Yorkshire Films, and so didn't have the budget to go al laround the world, not that the plot called for it anyway. Much of the film was shot in predominately residential areas of Nottingham, including St Ann's, Lenton and The Meadows, with one section featuring abandoned houses at the former airbase RAF Newton, just outside of Bingham, Nottinghamshire.
The film also didn't have much in the way of marketing, apart from posters and afore-mentioned trailer.
An example of a film with a medium sized budget is Hot Fuzz, which had a budget of $8 million.
The cast of this film are pretty much all famous, though some might not be known outside of the UK, though here they are familiar faces on British film and television. The actors in Hot Fuzz include Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton, Paddy Considine, Edward Woodward and Billie Whitelaw.
The makers had enough budget to make several explosions in the film, as well as use technology to remove a church from the background of the town they were filming in. Apart from this, there was not much notable technology used to make the film.
For the location, the town of Stow-on-the-Wold was considered, amongst others, but after being turned away, the company settled upon Wells, the director, Edgar Wright's hometown. The budget meant that they couldn't build an entire town from scratch but they could take over a town to film in for a while.
For marketing, the first two teaser trailers were released on 16 October 2006. Wright, Pegg, and Frost maintained several video blogs which were released at various times throughout the production of the film, Wright and Frost held a panel at the 2006 Comic-Con convention in San Diego, California to promote Hot Fuzz, which included preliminary footage and a question and answer session. The two returned to the convention again in 2007 to promote the US DVD release. Advanced screenings of the film took place on 14 February 2007 in the UK and the world premiere was on 16 February 2007. The premiere included escorts from motorcycle police officers and the use of blue carpet instead of the traditional red carpet. They also made sponsoship deals with Volkswagen.
Overall, it is clear that the budget of a film can make a substantial difference to the way that the film is produced, from who is in it, to where and how it is filmed, and what methods can be used to advertise it.
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