Today, or rather over the past few days I have tackled the creation of the shooting schedule. I want to try and share with you my approach to producing the schedule so you can get an idea of what I did in case it is particularly useful to anyone else who is about to create a schedule for their film.
Script Updates
I updated the script for a number of reasons which I described in a previous blog. These changes will reduce the amount of major changes to the schedule that I came up with. For me this was very important. I don’t mind accommodating small script changes to the schedule but any large ones will mean a lot of messing around and we don’t have time for messing around any more.
In terms of the script I had written the script in Word using the BBCs script smart template which handles all of the formatting for you. This is pretty basic script editing software but it was free and did what I had wanted it to do. I am not sure if buying one of the commercial alternatives or one of the free open source alternatives would have been any better. When writing the script I didn’t want to be constrained by creating a library of my locations and characters. I just wanted to write what was in my head with the intention of cleaning and standardising these values later on.
Create Schedule Template
I used a template that I had from working on my short film five years ago. This is basically an Excel spreadsheet that has some conditional formatting to make the strips on the production board go different colours dependent on the scene properties (i.e. Internal day = white, External night = blue, etc).
I made a couple of additions to this main sheet for the film. One was putting in the scene day to each strip and the other was adding the actual timing information to each strip instead of just the page length count that I had previously. I also added a column for the estimated number of set ups required for each scene.
Extract Locations and Characters
I extracted the locations and characters from the script using a lot of manual processes. Within word you can use its styles and formatting menu to select all instances of a particular style. As my characters who speak are all a particular style I could select all of them and copy the entries into a spreadsheet. I did a similar thing with the locations. Once I had them in a spreadsheet I manually de-duplicated them to get a unique list of all of the locations and speaking characters for the film.
I then went through a printed out copy of the script to identify any characters in the film that don’t speak. I could pretty much guess these from knowing the story so well so this wasn’t a long exercise.
Lastly I numbered the characters before adding them into the production board tab of my spreadsheet.
I tried to extract the scenes from the script in a similar way to the locations and characters but word seemed to be having a hard time with this and randomly I always seemed to get one scene wrong out of 130. Arrghhh!
I decided to just copy in everything the way that word had extracted them and would fix any that were wrong based on a 99% success rate!
This was the really pain-staking part of the process. I read through the script and checked the scene information that I had copied over earlier. I then added any characters that had appeared in the script.
While doing this I had to determine the page length of the scenes on paper. This was always going to be have to be done manually. In hindsight I could have written some software to try and do this first stage where you are just extracting the raw data and not adding any intelligence over the top of it.
I also decided to extract the props from the script at the same time. Needless to say this wasn’t the most exciting few hours of my life. Fingers crossed that I didn’t put anything in the wrong boxes.
A sample of the production board
Calculate character and location time by page length
Once I had the raw information in the spreadsheet I added two new tabs which followed a similar structure. They calculated the amount of page lengths that were within the script for each of the characters and for each location. Obviously this isn’t 100% accurate as 1/8 page of someone in contemplation is going to take a different amount of time to 1/8 page of dialogue but I wanted to be able to give Derek some information to go on in terms of how long we required each location for. At this point I was working off a shooting timescale of 18 days.
Organising scenes together
There were various iterations of this next stage and it is quite hard to write down exactly what I did or how I did it. But here goes!
- I organised the scenes by location.
- Then I organised the scenes by day/night.
- Then I organised the flat locations to be next to one another.
- Then organised the scenes within a location by cast member.
At this point I had a reasonable structure to start playing with. I tackled the flats first and for each location I worked reorganised a set of scenes until they fitted what I thought was reasonable to be shot in a day or in a night.
I then did this for the rest of the locations that are outwith the flats. I had to juggle these around a bit to get something that seemed to work in terms of locations and for actors. It ended up that the none flat locations don’t really follow the rules of organising that I described earlier on but it works.
At this point I had a draft version of the schedule to work from. I altered the spreadsheet to add a shooting day to the scenes so that all of the scenes that I thought of being shot in a single day all had the same shooting day. In total we now had 21 shooting days that had a reasonable plan and assumptions around them.
Calculate character and location time by shooting days
I performed the same calculation to find out the amount of time required by each character at each location but this time based on the breakdown of shooting days from the schedule rather than just the page length values. This information could then be provided to the location scouting team and the actors to inform them of what their particular requirements were.
Character days - showing shooting days and page lengths
Overview Diagrams
At this point the schedule was effectively complete. It was 132 columns wide in excel though and pretty unreadable. I decided to create a couple of diagrams that would help to summarise the overall schedule that could be printed on a side of A4 paper. I created two diagrams that were effectively a cross table of the locations against the story days as well as the characters against the story days. Then in a glance you can see that for story day 1 you need x actors within y locations. That way when we come to determine what actual day we will be shooting day 1 we can understand who and what is required for the shoot to go ahead.
The overview of location against shooting days