They didn't get $60k for a student film as that is the final budget on the movie. They got a tiny fraction of that to make a short student film. It ended up b

They didn't get $60k for a student film as that is the final budget on the movie. They got a tiny fraction of that to make a short student film. It ended up being so good that they were able to use it as a proof of concept to secure most of that $60k budget to expand it into a feature-length movie. Basically they made an MVP on the cheap and used that to secure additional funding to turn the MVP into an actual product.