Shooting Schedule and Shooting Writers
By Tony Vallone
I just finished school and immediately needed to dive right into pre-production madness. Basically a few weeks earlier I had gone through the latest draft of the script (146 pages) with Dan (Producer) and made a list of every location in the film, each scene it contributed to, all the primary information regarding shooting at that location, correlation to the script, possible fail safes (as in we don’t really need that actor there, someone could stand in), etc. This took an entire day. I call it an entire day because I wasn’t at all productive the rest of the day so I write it off as a using my entire day.
I guess that location list is where it all began because from that Dan needed to create a shooting schedule. Sounds easy right? Right? Maybe if you had all the money in the world. We pretty much needed to meet the needs of a lot of different parties. Some actors were only available during certain weeks, most locations required that we meet certain criteria, equipment wasn’t available all the time, and most everyone working on the film had (believe it or not) real lives. On top of all this there were certain requirements that myself and Brad (Director) had been fighting for. Dan definitely had his hands full.
Now this brings us to Friday, June 16th, the day I finished school. Or in other words, this last weekend. On my five-hour-turned-seven-hour drive home I was alerted to the fact that the schedule was basically not working out. It was too intense (too many pages per day), lasted too long (well over six weeks), and was costing more money than we had available. Every extra day of production increases the budget by a lot and like most people we like to hang on to our money if we can. Once I heard these words I knew I had a long weekend ahead of me.
For you see in pre-production of a small indie film like ours, once big problems are realized, and big walls are hit, they turn to the writers. In my dual role as writer and associate producer I am kind of responsible for both creative and logistical concerns. This means that Brad and I were given the task to cut the script by as much as we could while keeping production issues in the foreground. Some of the production issues were pretty specific like eliminating the necessity of needing actor A and actor B at the same time or cutting out all the things that would require expensive power and lighting equipment (like night exterior locations). This is where some knowledge of movie magic comes in handy. And Brad and I, we are magicians.
The interesting part to this whole story is that for months various people have been telling us to cut the script down already. 146 is a pretty ugly number in page count world. But Brad and I have been pretty stubborn about cutting things because we felt it would compromise too many elements in the film. We had excuses like “it’s long because of the inherent nature of a four story line script” and “no Dan, we just can’t”. Whenever we did manage to cut a few pages here and there, we’d always end up adding a few pages of new stuff that we thought of that was just so awesome we needed to keep it. We pretty much got nowhere. So now that we had guns to our heads, how were Brad and I going to cut things? In an effort to keep your interest, I’ll reveal the ending to this story first. The script is now a lean 118 pages and we are pretty happy with it. Want to know how we did it? Then keep reading. (What I just did was create a hook. Hooks are good.)
First of all, I’d like to point out that Brad and I are not dumb. It wasn’t the case that we took the “flaming space shuttle re-entry that crashes into Lake Tahoe” scene on page 100 and simplified it into the “cat licking its paw” scene on page 71. When we wrote the script we kept all of our scenes within producing-reason. The trouble is that we felt every scene needed to be in the story when really it didn’t. I think the biggest leap we made was when we realized that we don’t need to strongly reinforce ideas. If a scene does nothing else but restate a theme or emotion in a character then all it really is is redundant. Usually choices like this can be made in film editing but it’s much cheaper to just keep your writers from sleeping for a couple days. We ended up cutting a lot of dialogue that didn’t contribute enough to the story, consolidating multiple locations scenes into single location scenes, and cutting scenes that we decided didn’t bring much to the table. We did this by dividing the script into the four difference stories so we essentially had four 30-40 page scripts. We looked at them individually to see how to edit them on their own. Then I spent an afternoon piecing them back together in a way that kept energy between different stories flowing and consistent.
All in all it has been a pretty stressful weekend. Tomorrow we have an entire read through of the script (which is printing now) with all the actors in some fancy conference room in Hollywood. That should be interesting.
I just finished school and immediately needed to dive right into pre-production madness. Basically a few weeks earlier I had gone through the latest draft of the script (146 pages) with Dan (Producer) and made a list of every location in the film, each scene it contributed to, all the primary information regarding shooting at that location, correlation to the script, possible fail safes (as in we don’t really need that actor there, someone could stand in), etc. This took an entire day. I call it an entire day because I wasn’t at all productive the rest of the day so I write it off as a using my entire day.
I guess that location list is where it all began because from that Dan needed to create a shooting schedule. Sounds easy right? Right? Maybe if you had all the money in the world. We pretty much needed to meet the needs of a lot of different parties. Some actors were only available during certain weeks, most locations required that we meet certain criteria, equipment wasn’t available all the time, and most everyone working on the film had (believe it or not) real lives. On top of all this there were certain requirements that myself and Brad (Director) had been fighting for. Dan definitely had his hands full.
Now this brings us to Friday, June 16th, the day I finished school. Or in other words, this last weekend. On my five-hour-turned-seven-hour drive home I was alerted to the fact that the schedule was basically not working out. It was too intense (too many pages per day), lasted too long (well over six weeks), and was costing more money than we had available. Every extra day of production increases the budget by a lot and like most people we like to hang on to our money if we can. Once I heard these words I knew I had a long weekend ahead of me.
For you see in pre-production of a small indie film like ours, once big problems are realized, and big walls are hit, they turn to the writers. In my dual role as writer and associate producer I am kind of responsible for both creative and logistical concerns. This means that Brad and I were given the task to cut the script by as much as we could while keeping production issues in the foreground. Some of the production issues were pretty specific like eliminating the necessity of needing actor A and actor B at the same time or cutting out all the things that would require expensive power and lighting equipment (like night exterior locations). This is where some knowledge of movie magic comes in handy. And Brad and I, we are magicians.
The interesting part to this whole story is that for months various people have been telling us to cut the script down already. 146 is a pretty ugly number in page count world. But Brad and I have been pretty stubborn about cutting things because we felt it would compromise too many elements in the film. We had excuses like “it’s long because of the inherent nature of a four story line script” and “no Dan, we just can’t”. Whenever we did manage to cut a few pages here and there, we’d always end up adding a few pages of new stuff that we thought of that was just so awesome we needed to keep it. We pretty much got nowhere. So now that we had guns to our heads, how were Brad and I going to cut things? In an effort to keep your interest, I’ll reveal the ending to this story first. The script is now a lean 118 pages and we are pretty happy with it. Want to know how we did it? Then keep reading. (What I just did was create a hook. Hooks are good.)
First of all, I’d like to point out that Brad and I are not dumb. It wasn’t the case that we took the “flaming space shuttle re-entry that crashes into Lake Tahoe” scene on page 100 and simplified it into the “cat licking its paw” scene on page 71. When we wrote the script we kept all of our scenes within producing-reason. The trouble is that we felt every scene needed to be in the story when really it didn’t. I think the biggest leap we made was when we realized that we don’t need to strongly reinforce ideas. If a scene does nothing else but restate a theme or emotion in a character then all it really is is redundant. Usually choices like this can be made in film editing but it’s much cheaper to just keep your writers from sleeping for a couple days. We ended up cutting a lot of dialogue that didn’t contribute enough to the story, consolidating multiple locations scenes into single location scenes, and cutting scenes that we decided didn’t bring much to the table. We did this by dividing the script into the four difference stories so we essentially had four 30-40 page scripts. We looked at them individually to see how to edit them on their own. Then I spent an afternoon piecing them back together in a way that kept energy between different stories flowing and consistent.
All in all it has been a pretty stressful weekend. Tomorrow we have an entire read through of the script (which is printing now) with all the actors in some fancy conference room in Hollywood. That should be interesting.
Labels: Preproduction
posted by Tony Vallone at
2:17 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home