The tough thing with creative endeavors is that you really just need the motivation to start and continue making anything, it can be inexpensive stuff. The important thing is output and making it a regular thing.

That being said, gearing up for a new hobby is always fun if you can afford it. But you can absolutely make short films on an iPhone.

Cinematographer here. It is a very expensive industry but everybody starts somewhere and the technology has improved so much that even no money productions are doable now.

Shoot on your phone. Shoot outdoors. Use your mates as actors. Writing a script costs nothing but bare in mind everything you write could cost you money to acquire. The clever bit is how to write that without it costing much.

Above all story and characters are the most important so focus on those rather than expensive gear.

There’s also some great books out there. The guerilla filmmakers blueprint helped me out a lot when I started out.

All the answers here are good, but there’s probably a filmmaking 101 class at your local community college you could take if you wanted more structure to learn

the ting is it seems exspensive to get into this hobby becasue you need, props, a script, constumes, skills, etc.

• Props: Go dumpster-diving, go to thrift stores, raid your grandma’s attic
• Script: I’m a writer, and when I started writing in middle school, I used a $0.99 notebook and a pencil/pen. But if you already have a computer, you can just use that. The true investment here is time, it takes time to pick up the skill of writing. You also have to read a lot, just to observe how other writers and doing shit.
• Costumes: Same as props. Closets, dumpster diving, and thrift stores.
• Skills: No way out of this–you have to put the time in to develop these. It’s very much like planting a tree…you start today, keep practicing, and it will pay off later down the line when you can harvest the result

Basically, it sounds like you want to make an AAA list film without having developed any of the skills that would make someone trust you with that sort of fuck-you money.

Scale down your expectations. Scale them WAY down. Use what you have around you. Study the structure of films and story–that is completely free, and you can figure out how to film something with your phone by going out there with your phone and experimenting with angles.

Hell, something you could do today is take your phone, and go outside and find a piece of trash on the road, and start crawling around on the ground with your phone trying to see how epically you can film that piece of trash. Sure, you’ll look weird, and your first tries will suck ass–but nothing ventured, nothing gained. As someone smart on the interwebs said…kinda sucking at something is the first step to getting kinda good at something.

Then take your epic video of that piece of trash and bring it into a video editor on your computer and start messing around with stitching different cuts together, or overlaying text or free music clips you find online.

Do you live in a bigger city? If so there’s probably some indie filmmakers/actors and so forth you could search for and connect with. In my city there’s even a festival that shoots short movies in 60 hours. If nothing else maybe there’s a screening of short movies in your local cinema and that crowd might have good collaborators for you.