Don’t try to imitate Hollywood-style naturalism. One of the truest dictums of micro- and ultra-low-budget filmmaking is that it costs money to create the sort of polished “reality” that Hollywood films go for. If you do try to go for this reality, you’re competing against a larger pool of better-funded movies.

Back in the day, it would have been inconceivable to make a no-budget effects-heavy film, but that’s not the case now with so many filmmakers developing these skills. Director Cheslik is an After Effects whiz, and he designed Hundreds of Beavers knowing he’d be working for free on the film’s 1,500 (!) effects shots…

Cheslik shot Hundreds of Beavers in 1080p — no stressing over 4K for him! — on a mirrorless Panasonic GH5. Maybe that decision didn’t suit so well with the DP — “I ignorantly bought it before the DP was lined up, then handed it to the DP, and he said, ‘Oh,’” Cheslik remembered — but the tiny camera wound up working for the film.

After the film’s run at festivals like SITGES and Fantasia, some offers trickled in, but, says Ravenwood, “…what really bummed us out more is it seemed like most distributors wanted to put it in theaters for a week and then put it right on video on demand. We just didn’t believe that that was going to help this movie out.” The filmmakers reasoned that they could promote the film better than a distributor.

Berkus taped their memory cards to his drone and flew it down to where the filmmakers were waiting on an adjacent rooftop.

A key test for the film’s crew, however, was in integrating footage from across different camera types into a film that would look as immense and feel as immersive as the buildings Berkus and Nikolau climbed.

Zimbalist and Burkhonia tried to keep the same lens package on the cameras they shot with (first a Canon C-300 Mark II, then a Mark III, then a C-500) but were always conscious of adding in different grain structures to achieve a consistent visual look.

“We did use a lot of cinema grain to try and even out the look. So sometimes that meant degrading some of the sharper imagery in order to better match some of the less sharp imagery around it,” Zimbalist told IndieWire.

Shooting dramatic or introspective or even just preparatory scenes of Nikolau and Berkus training on the ground had the advantage of being done on the same two cameras with the same two lenses. The real challenge for the “Skywalkers: A Love Story” filmmakers, like their subjects, were the extreme climbs themselves. Zimbalist told IndieWire that they had to streamline all the gear Angela and Ivan would take with them on a climb, which included everything from selfie-stick footage and different iPhone cameras to GoPros and law-enforcement-grade night vision cameras. “There was a lot of matching in post,” Zimbalist said.