
American Meltdown, the debut feature from writer-director Andrew Adams, is an anti-capitalist “coming-of-rage” crowd-pleaser about a woman who loses her job and can’t pay rent… until she befriends a pickpocket who convinces her that the only way to make it in America is by committing petty crime.
Adams’ deeply personal storytelling propelled the film to a stellar festival run that included American Meltdown winning Best Feature at the Chattanooga Film Festival, where it premiered, as well as Best Screenplay at FilmQuest, and multiple performance awards for lead actors Jacki Von Preysing and Nicolette Sweeney. It was acquired by Quiver Distribution and released in November.
Below, Adams and the crew explain how they made a micro-budget feature that punches well above its weight class in terms of production value, acting, story, and style.—M.M.

Nicolette Sweeney as Mari, left, and Jacki Von Preysing as Olivia share a slice of van life in American Meltdown. Quiver Distribution.
THE MONEY

(L-R) American Meltdown team Alejandro Ramos (1AC), Mark Evans (DP), Andrew Adams (Director), Stewart Cory (Producer), Josh Atwell (Field Mixer), Clayton Farris (actor, “Lou”), Jacki Von Preysing (actress, “Olivia”), Mercedez Gonzalez (hair and makeup), Alex Kumph (filling in for Ivan de Crécy as grip/gaff), and Crystal Collins (co-producer).
Andrew Adams: The budget for American Meltdown was $75,000. Losing a dream job came with one silver lining: I qualified for a $35,000 low-interest Economic Injury Disaster Loan. Then, when my late and beloved grandfather heard my plans, he mailed me a $5,000 check. The remaining funds came from personal savings and credit cards, spread across four years of spending. Our goal then became to make $75,000 look and feel like $1,000,000.
Andrew Crabtree (producer): One of the most important things in budgeting for a true DIY indie is to remember: the budget will only ever go up. It’s as sure as death and taxes. If you only have $100k, and you build a project with $100k in mind… You will need $170,000. Suddenly you’re way out over your skis and you’re already halfway down the mountain. So we built our target budget for $40,000, knowing we could stretch personal funds up to $75,000 when those inevitable extra costs kicked in. And they did kick in.
Andrew Adams: We spent roughly $20,000 on production (crafty, costumes, props, camera and lighting, insurance, permits), $17,000 on locations, $23,000 on cast and crew fees, and $15,000 in post.
CAST & CREW
Andrew Crabtree: The single most important element of a DIY indie is the people. This movie looks and sounds as great as it does not because of expensive and fancy equipment, but because of our wildly talented cinematographer (Mark Evans), field audio mixer (Josh Atwell), editor (Josh Cole), make-up artist (Mercedez Gonzalez), on-set producer (Stewart Cory), co-producers (Crystal Collins and Coraline Kong) and many more. Similarly, the movie is fun and engaging because of the talent of the cast. These are things that you can’t, realistically, put a price on.
Andrew Adams: Cast and crew with intention. And hire friends. Actors Jacki Von Preysing, Shaun Boylan, and DeMorge Brown had been close creative collaborators for years, and scene-stealer Clayton Farris was a friend of Drew’s. Shared histories created a sense of trust that was essential to get through the hardest moments of production. We all knew that we had each other’s backs and were making something rad.
Also Read: In American Meltdown, Andrew Adams Channels a Generation’s Sense of Being Robbed
Andrew Crabtree: Everybody has to understand what movie you’re making. The very first conversation we had with any new hire was to explain openly and honestly what kind of movie this was. We didn’t have the resources or the luxuries that other, larger shoots have, and we didn’t want to pretend to be bigger than our boots. We needed folks who understood the assignment. Making a DIY indie is not for everyone, and that’s okay! But our cast and crew understood from the jump what they were getting into and we were blessed with a team that relished the challenge, saddled up, and worked together to make the very best film we could.
Andrew Adams: I rehearsed with the cast on Zoom during Covid lockdowns, allowing plenty of room for improv, then rewrote the script to incorporate the actors’ ideas. Clayton became more villainous, Nicolette more grounded. We wove this collaborative and improvisational spirit into the script early, so we could arrive on set with a tight screenplay that was ready to shoot.
CAMERA
Mark Evans (cinematographer): It’s really easy to make a movie look this good on a dime if you’re willing to make a deal with the devil to give away your firstborn’s immortal soul. In all honesty, much of the film’s visual success stems from the locations, which were very carefully chosen. Time of day and location of the sun were far more important than any of the actual gear we had on the show, and pre-planning our shooting windows to the position of the sun helped us stretch the look of the movie beyond our very limited means.
Andrew Adams: We didn’t have an art department, so I scouted for months to find locations that were already beautiful. Then we let the world do the work. We shot in December so that the sun would hang lower in the sky all day, natural backlights and bounces would be easier to achieve, and we could shoot (generally) from 11 a.m. to midnight and get plenty of dark night scenes without forcing our crew to work overnight.
Mark Evans: We also had to reconcile lighting styles we wanted with the realities of what we could afford. I had only a young French film student to help me grip and gaff the entire feature, Ivan de Crécy, and I will be forever in his debt not just for his incredible work ethic but also for his willingness to embrace the challenges of a DIY feature.
I chose lights that could be rigged with only two people, didn’t need generators or tow plants, and could run on battery power if need be. The Astera Titan tube and Nyx Bulb Edison kits reigned supreme. I wrapped almost all the tubes in control grids and cheap white pool noodles (sourced on Amazon) to soften and disperse the source, then hid them all over the place. The largest units we had were two Mole LED 1600w Tener Fresnels, some of the first of their kind (which made them very cheap to rent). They were absolute beasts and truly devastating to move around, but effective nonetheless. They were daylight balanced only, so we were constantly wrapping the units in colored gels to get into the desired palette for our night work. The camera was an old, discounted Alexa SXT.
Andrew Adams: Mark and I agreed, early on, that a polished studio look best suited the story. Which was a challenge, given that we had no extra hands to help “polish” the look and only a fraction of a studio’s resources.
Mark Evans: That decision probably took five years off my life.

Andrew Adams: Mark also introduced me to Matt Workman’s Cine Tracer software, which we used to pre-visualize every single frame of the movie.
Mark Evans: Cine Tracer was instrumental. After scouting our locations, I virtually reconstructed each of our sets in the program. We could place virtual cameras alongside posable “actor” models, allowing us to walk through blocking and action for every scene.
When you’re making an indie like this, having nitty-gritty conversations about camera placement, intention, and design in advance is a life saver. It created a blueprint that Andrew and I were able to rely on (though we often threw it out) and gave us confidence on set. I can’t emphasize enough how much that saved our bacon. When you’re strapped for resources and up against the wall with a schedule like we had, having the difficult conversations in advance will get you through.

EDITING AMERICAN MELTDOWN
The post-production team came down to essentially four people: editor Joshua Cole, co-editor Jon Falk, sound designer/mixer Alex Britten, and colorist Billy Hobson.
Josh Cole (editor): Can we talk about how editorial was so low-budget that it was funded with burritos?
Andrew Crabtree: 100% yes, without irony.
Andrew Adams: The No. 1 rule of low-budget filmmaking is that a well-fed crew is a happy crew.
Josh Cole: We found it was important to watch cuts of the film in rooms of people, because you begin to see the film completely differently than in the suite. You often finish a screening already knowing what needs to be changed — even before getting feedback.
Because this movie is a tricky blend of comedy, drama, and crime, the main note we got was about tone. Much of the tonal balance was established in the first act of the film, and so our first ten minutes required more experimentation and editing than any other section of the movie. At first our opening was too long and slow, so we streamlined to the barest essentials — only to discover that we had lost too much and audiences stopped connecting with our lead. This required finesse.
Our earliest cuts embraced a comedic tone. We left in every joke that got a laugh, only to find that they undercut the drama later on. Our next cuts embraced drama. We cut out every joke we could, and discovered that the story got more emotionally compelling… but less fun to watch. Which required a third stage: balance. We swapped jokes and music cues in and out until we knew which broke the reality and which sustained it. Finding the right pace and tone required a lot of time, experimentation, discussion, and a willingness to kill the darlings.
Plus burritos.
MUSIC
Andrew Adams: I once worked on a lush and cinematic horror film where a full 25% of the budget went to the art department, and it helped me understand that a filmmaker’s budgeting choices can define their voice and style. I’m obsessed with music and knew it was a department where I wanted zero compromises, so I promised to spend whatever it took to get the score right.
We sought out the best composer possible and landed on rising star Jason Martin Castillo after hitting it off over coffee. I requested a dark and funky score that fused Marvin Gaye with Jonny Greenwood. Jason proceeded to compose music that sounded like a five-piece funk band live-scoring the film. The result is an anxious, percussive, and beautiful suite of songs.
COLOR
Andrew Adams: Billy Hobson is a world-class colorist at Harbor Picture Company, with credits like The Peanut Butter Falcon, New Life and Los Frikis. He agreed to work on our film based not on the budget, but on some good times he had years ago while working at a camera house with our cinematographer. The lesson being: be nice to everyone. The friendships you make when you’re 22 can move mountains down the line. We communicated our vision to Billy by sharing a PDF of reference images for each scene and look. He embraced dark shadows, filmic grain, and a sense of naturalistic imperfection.
VFX
Andrew Adams: Everybody who read the script in prep had one question: “How the hell are you gonna burn down a house?” It was vital for a climactic and thematically key arson sequence. The short answer is that we hired an amazing VFX artist named Jared Potter. But if he’s unavailable for your next project… here’s the long answer.
Before ever writing the fire scene, I studied VFX stock footage libraries like ActionVFX for pre-existing elements that I could craft a scene around. After noting some particularly strong “window flame” assets for sale, I reverse-engineered plot details to center the action around a window. As Mark and I designed shots, we’d constantly cross-reference ActionVFX to ensure that matching flame elements already existed.
On set, we filmed wide plate shots of the house (without setting it on fire, believe it or not) in a variety of lighting conditions, utilizing flickering Astera tubes to emulate flame or bright flashes of hot white light for explosions. Then digital flames were added in post.
For close-ups, Mark and I drove out into the desert, dumped all our remaining props in front of a 2×4 painted to match the house walls, popped some beers, and lit that shit up.
But the real flame in our close-ups failed to match the digital flame in our wide shots. It was… obvious. So Jared did some miracle work. He pulled color information out of our close-ups and used it to make the digital flames in the wides more accurate. Then he mixed both real and digital flames into individual frames, tricking the eyes and blurring the boundaries. Now our real fire close-ups include digital flame, sparks, and smoke as foreground elements.
CONCLUSION
Andrew Crabtree: One through-line that pops up in every element is planning. Or, in many cases, reverse-engineering. We knew we weren’t going to have the budget we wanted, so we had to be smart about what we could realistically put on screen.
Almost all of this was done by Andrew in the writing stage: setting scenes in locations where we could shoot for free (outdoors and in public spaces, for example). Writing roles catered to certain actors we already knew and loved. Crafting a third act built specifically around VFX assets we knew we could get our hands on. This kind of forward thinking was paramount in allowing us to pull this all off.
Andrew Adams: The shoot was tough, but the hardest part has been getting people to watch. Though they tend to love it when they do. So please, by all means — check out American Meltdown!
Learn more at geni.us/americanmeltdown.
Main image: American Meltdown. Quiver Distribution.