While it’s not exactly his first stab at making a film, financial circumstances are forcing Uwe Boll to ask for cash online to get his latest project shot.

But even if you’ve got good ideas for movies, getting your first foot in the cinematic door can be a tough process.

Still, low and micro-budget projects can succeed and plenty of budding writer/directors have grown healthy careers out of seed money – most of them long before the web was born.

So if you’re thinking of finally realising that six-hour epic retelling of Waterloo… well, look elsewhere.

If your ambitions are a little smaller to start, we can help.

First off, enter our competition to win a cool Panasonic HDC-SD20 camcorder to get you started on the kit front.

And once you're good to shoot, why not try following the example of these plucky pic-makers?


1. Sell your body… For drug trials

The Film: El Mariachi

The Filmmaker: Robert Rodriguez

The Story: “I was in a research hospital called Pharmaco back in Austin, Texas. I was in there for a month testing a cholesterol-lowering drug. And I wrote the entire screenplay in the last three weeks that I was there.”

Rodriguez raised $7,000 to get the film shot before editing it on videotape and – for the first time in the history of film – selling it to distributor Columbia Pictures based on just the tape, not a print.

The Warning: Just be careful which kind of drug you sign up for. Extra limbs could be useful, but anal trenching is something to be avoided.