No Budget, No Problem: How 'For The Sake of It' Got Made With a $50 Lens and Zero Clients

The lens that shot 80% of 'For The Sake of It' cost fifty dollars on eBay. It's a vintage Olympus push-pull zoom — a 35-105 with variable aperture — mounted on a RED cinema camera that nobody mounts vintage Olympus glass on. That's kind of the whole story, as Daybreak Pub tells it in a recent conversation with filmmakers Jacob Oster and Alex Palumbo.

The film centers on Jacob Callaghan — skier, musician, vintage Volkswagen builder, and by all accounts a person who has genuinely figured out how to stop performing for an audience. The thesis: it doesn't matter if car people think your VW is cool, or if listeners dig your music, or if anyone thinks you rip on skis. You do it because you do it. The rest is noise. Three filmmakers and a self-funded passion project tried to build a cohesive film around that idea — connecting skiing, music, and old German cars, three things that have essentially nothing to do with each other.

The gear list reads like a beautiful middle finger to the rental house invoice. A first-generation Blackmagic Pocket camera from 2012 — battery dies in ten minutes, 16mm sensor, nobody shoots on it anymore — got mounted to a $20 magic arm for car POVs. They put it in a fire. For exterior car shots, the crew jammed a tripod into the rusty bumper of Callaghan's VW, ratchet-strapped it at a 30-degree angle, and put a RED on top. "That's a shitty rig, man," Oster says in the piece. "Any established filmmaker would be like, 'Dude, you guys are loose.'" The wobble from the old bumper ended up giving those shots a period-piece quality that a proper car mount never would have. The chaos was the aesthetic.

Some of the film's best moments came sideways. Callaghan's car broke down mid-interview — the windshield-mounted camera caught the whole thing, him walking down a snowy road empty-handed, returning with a gas can. A mailbox on a quiet street popped open perfectly as the VW truck blew past. Oster had loosened the latch slightly. They radioed Callaghan to hug the curb. They waited. It flipped open. They cheered. A pile of synthesizer recordings Callaghan sent over — "I don't think you're gonna be able to use these" — became the film's entire score. Archival ski footage from his childhood, sent by his dad, ended up bridging the film's two biggest themes. None of it was planned. All of it was kept.

Palumbo's takeaway lands cleanly: "You never really get hired for the commercials you shoot. You get hired for the stuff you do for fun with your friends." That's the argument for personal projects, made in the most personal possible way — by actually finishing one. No sponsor, no shot list carved in stone, no producer trying to move the day. Just three people in the same house for five days, arguing about why one shot is better than another, figuring it out as they went.

There's a version of this story that gets packaged into a gear ad or a 'chase your passion' caption under a hero shot. This isn't that. It's three working filmmakers who know how to do the job, choosing not to do it the safe way — and ending up with something they couldn't have planned. The film is called 'For The Sake of It.' Watch it.