As you might have noticed, the homemade looking ghost movie Paranormal Activity is on a mission to rule the world with ours and many others’ support (Read: Help Needed NOW! You The Fans Can Get ‘Paranormal Activity’ The Wide Release It Deserves!). That movie was Oren Peli’s first ever movie as a director, but it has not taken him a long time to line up a second job that will run in the same circles as his first work.

The trades are reporting that Peli will make a movie called Area 51 in which a group of three teens decide to grab their video camera and head to the infamous and mysterious Nevada desert location that is so renowned for its tales of alien species crashing and being stored there. That is about all that is known of the project, but as you can assume, what these three will surely document is some unbelievable footage of alien beings that may just get out of hand in a hurry. Paranormal producer Jason Blum will return for this project, and the budget will be a massive $5 Million. That may not sound like much in the world of movies, but remembering that Paranormal only cost $11,000, you can only imagine what Peli will come up with.

The shaky-cam style is obviously a very popular one. Whether you love them or hate them, you can’t deny the intrigue that comes from movies like The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, and now Paranormal Activity — movies that allow us to really pretend like this is real footage. I for one love them, so long as the topic is fun enough and it’s not done with every single movie ever made, like this 3-D re-phenomenon.

It’s become clear for the most part that if you make these films with as small a budget as humanly possible, you force the film makers to really get creative, and that manufactures and inspires even more originality. The more budget you add, the more options you offer to cut corners and take easier roads. Cloverfield is the exception to this so far, costing $25 Million to make, although it was significantly larger in scale than others of its kind and some may just think that it is a prime example of budget affecting the final product. Cloverfield went on to make $170 Million worldwide, while Blair Witch cost $60,000 to make and took down $248 Million worldwide.

So my question you fine people is: does a larger budget help these personal “home movie” movies, or is it better to go on scraps?

[Source: Variety]