This is a very interesting project and nice to read about people creating films with little or no budget. I'm looking forward to checking out the BTS videos!

Good article! Filmmaking with no financial backing boils down to lots of hard work. Blackmagic cameras are great low budget solutions that produce wonderful images for the money. I'm using my bmcc on my film "Girl, Yeti, and a Spaceship".
Blender is absolutely wonderful for making great effects and 3d models and it's free! I think that hard work and spending years doing all the post production yourself is what's required when you don't have a budget. I used Blender, Final Cut Pro 7, and Color on my first movie "Space Trucker Bruce". I'm currently spending 2 years modeling, animating and compositing the spaceship scenes for my new movie "Girl Yeti and a Spaceship". The toughest part for me with these indie projects is spending 6 years creating it. I'm not sure if there's a faster way given all the work that needs to be done, also working full time, and only so many hours in the day. The amount of work really necessitates being happy with the script. Hard to put in all that work if you don't love what you're making,

Of course any of Edgar Wright's own films are great, Hot Fuzz being my favorite and Shaun of the Dead being perhaps a bit to relevant to current events but still good. Also the Spaced TV series.

I'll also suggest Space Trucker Bruce (because it's my movie)
Bruce practices the way of the Zen Space Trucker to keep from going crazy spending six months by himself in a house sized spaceship hauling 20,000 tons of hog fat.
On YouTube and Amazon Prime.

There's a cool b-movie YouTube series (and San Francisco TV show) called Creature Features which shows old sci-fi and horror movies with quirky hosts and cool celebrity guests.

That's so awesome that they used real robots! That's a really good idea finding a university or private company in your area willing to loan robots for little or no cost. I've wanted to use real robots but the time involved in making them is prohibitive. I've resorted to making puppets that look like robots. I also put my 9 year old son into a robot costume for one shot taking advantage of his small size. He thought this was pretty cool although the costume was a brittle and the arms came apart during production. We still got the shot but the costume was destroyed.

I think a good theme is more important than whether it's relatable to the mass market. I'd much rather make a movie about a theme I really care about than insert family or some other device to make it relatable. There's probably too much family stuff out there these days anyway. What about "work sucks" or "loneliness and the value of friends" or "finding purpose" or "beagles are little creatures from hell despite their cute exterior"

The original Star Wars fight sequence was great in that it was more about the story and less about the fancy fighting moves as you point out. The problem with some of the fight scenes in later Star Wars movies was they increased the fancy action moves without it really helping the story. Long action fight sequences can also get a bit boring perhaps due to the predictability like in second Matrix movie or the over the top super long complicated main fight sequence in Inception. The first three Indiana Jones movies had wonderful fight scenes that helped the story, had variety, and made you wonder if Indiana Jones was going to win or not. A good idea for us indie filmmakers is to plan the sequences out very well and have some kind of fight stunt coordinator (or wannabe) on hand to help with the planning.