You seen the posters, had the gut feeling and then something about the "trailer" confirms that suspicion.
Where I've zero against bona fide low budget productions, too many look plain cheap and, well, not very good.
If you could put your finger on it, why would you say that was?
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The film looks like “video”, meaning flat lighting and zero color grading
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Often bad graphics and cheap-looking typefaces can be a red flag.
Adding to what Dan mentioned: bad angles,framing,composition, shakey-cam (i.e. too much handheld) and bad editing ...
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Poor graphics, poor focus, poor editing, and poor, ineffective shaky cam. Gawd, bad shaky cam... Another issue, not visual but immediately problematic is poor sound. I can handle visual limitations as I love and watch a lot of Indie films but bad, low, muffled dialogue and sound level inconsistencies, or bad or no foley, etc... yeah, that’s difficult for me as an audience member.
Shooting it on videotape similar to how a lot of BBC television series were shot up until the 1990s.
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Inexperience to direct and produce, and no artistic sense.
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For me, the single biggest give away when I'm watching something is the audio. If the dialogue sounds like their speaking through soup cans, if they didn't get room tone to cover the hollowness/echo/bounce of the rooms/sets/locations, then it smacks of very low budget.
Of course there are other things like performances, lighting, continuity, and so on, but audio is the firs thing I notice.
Inexperience.
@Beth has a point, SOUND can be a killer, as can be bad direction. The sound is what is inside your head, accompanying the visuals and acting. People might pontificate on what camera technique was used yet folk are still cramming into festival cinemas to watch Charlie Chaplain, Alfred Hitchcock, and even earlier films where the screen may have been "grainy" yet it was a damn good film.
Yes, also agree about the audio. I saw a short recently, which generally had some problems, but the most jarring thing was actually the poor audio.
I don't think low-budget's an issue. A film/video can be low-budget and look/sound/be great, if the filmmakers responsible take the time to tell a good story with what little they have. But what makes a project amateurish? Bad sound, gfx, lighting, acting, too long transitions/shots, jumping the line for no good reason, bad direction.
To me there is no movie look "low budget", there is a concept that can escape: when you're on a tight budget you simply can't make movie stories like Avatar, Titanic or Marvel Movie, if you do, it will look "low budget" movie, I mean, You should ask yourself: could I realize this project with my resources?.
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one of the best “low budget” movies ever made is “Moonlight”. Supposedly cost $1.5M. The movie looks like 10x the budget; it’s technically flawless.
The core Crew (Dp, Director, Prod Designer, Editor, Casting, Producers) became rockstars in their field.
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Right. There's looking "low budget" (or however you wish to label it) with a poor physical and technical approach and/or a lack of "professional-looking" effort or maybe inexperience, and poor story execution. And then there are incredible films made by filmmakers who can work within and yet creatively exceed any limitations of a low budget. I'm blown away by great work out there!
One micro-budget film that I really enjoyed is The Vast of Night set in the 1950s, New Mexico. There's a couple of technical things, sometimes, such as poor lighting, too dark at times, no "eye-light" on actors here and there, and the color grading makes the dark areas look a little brown at times too, which I suppose gives it an "aged" look. But knowing what they accomplished with budget limitations and using what they had available to them you easily forgive and look past that sort of stuff. It's Andrew Patterson's debut film, and it's simple, wonderful, and enjoyable. There's some long, single 9-10 minute takes with lots of dialogue that the actors totally pull off. It's done for effect but also to save filming time—can't do a ton of takes with a low budget. It also does things that you're not supposed to do like long blocks of dialogue and voiceover (a character whose voice you only hear through a phone). I loved it for that! A truly effective choice for this film—the whole thing is "in the moment." There's also this one long-tracking shot that takes you from a character standing in a doorway, then down main street, cuts through yards, through a parking lot, and then goes inside a gymnasium, hovers there, viewing a basketball game, and then goes through people in the stands and up and out a high window back to the ground outside, then zooms off again—and it is well-executed! Apparently, to achieve that long-tracking shot because they did not have the equipment to do it, they basically passed the camera from person to person, to an 18-year-old kid on a go-kart to zoom across streets, houses, cars in a parking lot, even up and down a ladder, etc, while filming. It's fantastic! My gawd... and the extras! The whole town they filmed in helped out. Anyway, yeah, low budget... it truly depends on whose hands it is in and who is doing the work. ;)
Editing. Poor editing is usually a glaring sign of the "low budget look". That and poor performances from the cast.
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Just flat poor quality craftsmanship from one end to the other (good equipment is not the answer).
The acting and on the nose dialogue. Cringeworthy stuff.
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I agree, Goran Zivanovic - dialogue can be very cringeworthy. But you can find that on any budget film/TV show. CW's The Flash is a prime example of OTN/cringey dialogue!