I'm considering restarting this thing I used to run called the "no budget film contest", where the rules were you couldn't buy anything for the film or have the film consume anything.

Basically, I'm annoyed that even though most people in the west have phones with video cameras in them, even indie/amateur films are expensive, and even stuff destined for youtube has progressively growing budgets.

Proving that you can make a good film without spending *any* money would be nice.

@enkiv2 The video editing software always seems to be the hurdle for me. There are some freebies out there though; Blender does video (dunno about audio?) and there's a free edition of Lightworks.

@joshg I've heard good things about Hitfilm Express, but I don't have a 64-bit windows box to try it on.

On the free software side, there's LiVeS, Kino, and a whole host of others for Linux (none of which are very good IMO but all of which are probably better than Blender) & VirtualDub for Windows (which also does the job but not very well).

For audio, I'd go with Audacity on every platform: it's free & straightforward.