Brendan Thwaites and Olivia Cooke in a scene from film, The Signal, which tells the story of three college computer geniuses who find themselves transported to an otherworldly lab.

FOR his new film The Signal, which opens in the US next week, writer-director Will Eubank had to make do with a budget of about $US4 million ($4.3m), minuscule by mainstream science fiction movie standards.

He was able to cast a genuine science fiction movie star, Laurence Fishburne, who worked for far below his normal pay rate as a mysterious scientist. He squeezed into a small space after the big-budget production Transcendence decided to use the same New Mexico facility. (Eubank filmed his previous movie in a makeshift international space station he built in his parents’ back yard.)

He needed to economise in other ways while making The ­Signal, which tells of three college computer geniuses who find themselves transported to an ­otherworldly lab. He shot some scenes using the kind of Canon digital camera you can get on eBay for $US500, lit by what he calls “Ikea lighting”. One of the film’s cool visual effects, an earth-shaking attack, involves ­Eubank and his brother banging on a trampoline to make pieces of cork bounce.

There is no shortage of science fiction extravaganzas costing $US100 million and up to produce. But a new generation of filmmakers is showing you don’t need an Avatar budget to probe sci-fi’s mind-bending themes: the mysteries of outer space, the implications of time travel, the future of artificial intelligence, and ­humanity’s origins.

Low-fi sci-fi has morphed into something new. By focusing on concepts and characters over spectacle, these directors are distancing themselves from the low-budget sci-fi of the past, those classic B-movies that gave us ­rubber-suit monsters and paper-plate flying saucers.

“Suddenly everyone who has a cool story in their mind can make a sci-fi movie. It’s not like there are more nerds or geeks than there were yesteryear, just that now we’re armed,” says Eubank.

In I Origins, a startling discovery by molecular biologists raises questions about science and spirituality. Directed by Mike ­Cahill, it came in at about $US1m.

To save money, Cahill shot scenes in friends’ apartments and an unoccupied lab at New York’s Rocke­feller University. Then he put a good chunk of his budget on one spectacular shot he wanted to get in India that required an expensive crane and elaborate camera movement. “I think if you just pick those important moments, you can make the movie look expensive and big,” he says.

The Machine was made for about $US1.5m. It examines the merging of human and artificial intelligence, a topic the Johnny Depp film Transcendence tackled with a budget close to $US100m higher. The film is set in a British research lab in a near-future society, but director Caradog James avoided trying to create a Blade Runner-ish outside world. He kept the action almost exclusively inside a single, dark warehouse.

Low-fi sci-fi films are serving as a training ground for some filmmakers who are increasingly getting picked off for big-budget assignments.

Director Colin Trevorrow graduated from the 2012 indie time-travel film Safety Not Guaranteed (estimated budget $US750,000) to the forthcoming Jurassic World ($US150m-ish). Director Neill Blomkamp’s budget nearly quadrupled from District 9 in 2009 to Elysium last year.

Before directing the $US160m blockbuster Godzilla, Gareth Edwards had directed only one feature film, a 2010 movie called Monsters. It had a budget of $500,000. He served as director, screenwriter, cinematographer and set designer, and created visual effects, including a huge squid-like alien that attacks a petrol station, on a laptop PC in his bedroom, using off-the-shelf graphics ­software.

“We say ‘home computer’, but the reality is your laptop at home is more powerful than the computers they used to animate Jurassic Park,” Edwards says. “It’s levelling the playing field.”

Before The Signal, Eubank built an international space station in his parents’ back yard, using $US17,000 of hardware supplies. He did that to make Love, a 2011 film about an astronaut stranded in space. He was 24, unemployed, and had moved back into his parents’ house in southern California. Produced for about $US500,000, Love preceded the $US130m, Oscar-nominated Gravity by a couple of years but often looks very similar to it.

He assembled semicircular skateboarding half-pipes from plywood and flipped them on top of each other to create the space station’s tubular passageways. He ordered blinking LED Christmas lights from Amazon to make control panels flash. He shot Love with a donated digital camera and edited it on his home computer. It won him the award for best director at the Athens International Film Festival in 2011.

In the indie film Under the Skin, a predatory alien becomes aware of her individuality for the first time. Its filmmakers used hidden cameras to capture Scarlett ­Johansson (working far below her normal pay rate) mingling and improvising with non-actors in Scotland. It was conceived as a $US40m film with Brad Pitt co-starring but made without him for about $US11m. The filmmakers ruthlessly pared down its ambitions to get it made. An opening scene showing an alien synthesised in space, which alone would have cost more than $US1.5m, was scrapped and became a close-up of an eye. The alien’s voyage to Earth is suggested more than shown.

The low-fi sci-fi boom is attracting studio attention. Paramount Pictures, which distributed the low-budget Paranormal Activity horror films, launched a unit in 2010 called Insurge Pictures to distribute micro-budget films, including science fiction. Its pipeline includes Project Almanac, about a group of teens who discover (and of course get on video) plans for a time machine. “The opportunity in these (fake amateur video) movies is that you can take very, very big ideas and photograph them in a scrappy sort of way,” says Adam Goodman, president of Paramount’s Film Group. “The technique allows you to experience something in real time that has global appeal but without having to build gigantic sets or cast ­thousands of people.”

A small budget really doesn’t need to be a disadvantage for most sci-fi themes. Time travel? The 2004 film Primer, which inspired many low-budget sci-fi filmmakers, reportedly was made for $US7000. It is about computer engineers running a start-up circuit-board company out of a garage who stumble on to technology that can send objects back in time. Writer-director Shane Carruth filmed it in his parents’ garage, borrowed hi-tech instrumentation to use as props from a family friend, and built a human-sized time travel box out of PVC tubes and sheet metal.

Part of what makes Primer work is its scenes filled with ultra-specific technical language, jargon that more mainstream films often shy away from.

Want to set a film in outer space? Even James Cameron and George Lucas can’t shoot on location. The deck of a spaceship usually is a soundstage, whether it is in a $US130m production such as Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012) or a $US5m picture such as Duncan Jones’s Moon (2009). How do you avoid a budget-busting alien-invasion scene? In Monsters, ­Edwards begins by describing it in text screens: “Six years ago, NASA discovered the possibility of alien life within our solar system …”

Edwards ended up having 30 “creature” shots in Monsters, about the same as in Jurassic Park, he says. There’s no need to spend time and money overdoing it: “If you look at how many times you see the shark in Jaws or the alien in Alien, they’re very efficient with it. You don’t have to see this stuff all the time to feel it.”

Even though powerful digital tools are now available to low-cost filmmakers, Edwards offers a caution. He spent 10 years as a visual effects artist before using common software (including Adobe After Effects and Autodesk 3ds Max) to create the impressive creatures in Monsters. The barriers to making a film have been lowered, but these tools still require skilled craftspeople to make them work.

“One of the typical reactions I get is, ‘Oh wow, what software did you use? How much is it?’ It’s kind of like if you read a book you really liked, and you asked the writer, ‘Did you do that on Microsoft Word? Can I buy that font?’”

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL