Made on a budget of $13,000.
Although the coloration of the film changes from shot to shot, it is generally at a 93% color desaturation. In a parallel, San Francisco, where the movie is shot and set, had at the time a 7% black population, the black/white race relations an important theme of the movie.
Shortly after completing the film, a friend suggested to writer/director Barry Jenkins to watch Damien Chazelle's film Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009) given it was another black and white contemporary film gaining momentum among the indie circuit. Ironically, a friend of Chazelle's told him to watch this film shortly after completing his film. Both directors were up for several Academy Awards in 2017 for their films Moonlight: Sob a Luz do Luar (2016) and La La Land: Cantando Estações (2016) respectively and only discovered this after speaking to one another during The Hollywood Report's Oscar's Roundtable.
The shooting schedule for the low budget film was only 13 days.