New Nines stuff in the Library
I’ve added two .pdfs to the Library. (Which is the rechristened “Downloads” section. Thanks to whichever reader suggested renaming it.)
The visual FX breakdown for two of the sequences — the end of Part One, and the end of Part Three. Both are spoilers, so skip them if you haven’t seen the movie yet.
The shooting schedule. This is pretty close to how we ended up doing it.
Shooting schedules are hard to read if you’ve never looked at one, so let me talk you through it.
Starting at the left is the strip number. Because some scenes may have more than one part — for instance, a visual effect in addition the main action — you sometimes (rarely) need to refer to the strip rather than the scene number.
Next is the scene number. For The Nines, we numbered all of the Part One scenes in the 100s, Part Two in the 200s, and Part Three in the 300s. Most movies would just go sequentially from 1. Read here for more info on scene numbers with letters.
The third column is a short description of the scene, along with INT or EXT, DAY or NIGHT. Note that the line producer or AD writes this description, so it’s not always what the writer would pick.
Fourth column is the length of the scene, measured in eighths of page.
The final column shows which characters are in the scene, by number. Generally, your most important characters are given the lowest numbers, with preference for the bigger stars. In the case of The Nines, our numbering system went as follows:
- Gary/Gavin/Gabriel = 1/5/18
- Margaret/Melissa/Mary = 2/7/19
- Sarah/Susan/Sierra = 3/6/20
To see how much work is scheduled on a given day, look down to the divider strips, marked “– END OF DAY…” This tells you how many pages you’re expecting to shoot.
As you’ll see, we shot 4-5 pages a day — fairly ambitious for a feature, though indies tend to shoot more pages per day simply because limited budgets mean short schedules.
You can find both documents here.
Articles
May 10th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
To me, 4-5 pages per day seems light
On my current project, some days we were shooting double that. Gotta love indies.
May 11th, 2008 at 12:06 am
The first film I worked on I think we averaged 3 pages a day and that was on a $2 million budget.
May 11th, 2008 at 6:51 am
Thanks a lot, John! Especially for the shotlist. It’s very interesting for a film student to see all the paper work behind a professional movie that’s already hit the big screen. I had to shoot a music video myself last week, I had a well thought out shotlist, too, but in the end we didn’t really stick to it entirely G
Did you really stick 100% to your shotlist while filming The Nines or were there moments when you had to depart from it?
I guess the more expensive a film, the more you have to stick to the actual shotlist, right?
May 11th, 2008 at 8:55 am
What’s the usual average for a film like this?
4-5 doesn’t seem bad to me.
May 11th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
@Sarah:
I didn’t stick particularly close to the shotlist, but the schedule was dead-on. We pretty much had to shoot exactly those scenes on exactly those days to make it work.
@Ayz:
You’ll find indies that shoot 10 pages a day, but a movie the size of The Nines would generally be in this range. The first week was the only really brutal one, but it was by far the most expensive per-day because of locations and cameras.
Go was also 4-5 pages a day, but over a longer schedule. You generally won’t find studio features shooting that much — I just visited a friend’s movie, which only scheduled 1 7/8 on the day I stopped by.
TV dramas shoot six or more pages a day to make their schedules. They have the benefit of standing sets, which make lighting faster.
May 11th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Gotcha. Very interesting.
May 12th, 2008 at 1:34 am
Hehe, thanks, John. Our lecturer always tells us that “everything” can be planned beforehand… I couldn’t quite believe it. You were shooting with the HVX200, right? Strangely it did not show the “frames” in the timecode as we were shooting and nobody in college knows how to adjust it! It seems like a joke!
May 12th, 2008 at 7:13 am
@Sarah:
The Nines was shot on film, and SD video for Part Two.
The web pilot I just shot was on the HVX200. I’m no camera whiz, but it does show frame rate.
May 12th, 2008 at 7:52 am
Everything can be planned in advance. In fact, it should be. There are enough things that are going to go wrong that it’s just bad medicine not to have everything at least planned to go right. (There are those whose style involves just setting up the cameras and actors and having the script nearby for reference, but I’m not one of them. Then again I’ve never made In The Mood For Love.)
Now, that doesn’t mean that nature and time and other forces beyond your control won’t completely make a mockery of your planning.
But it can and should be planned.
As for shooting 10 pages a day, indies do it for obvious reasons — namely, because they have to — but no one in their right mind, having done it, would choose to do it again, had they any choice.
Along that line, it’s not that hard to shoot a bad feature in 24 days, but 24 days for The Nines — given how it turned out — is impressive.
P.S. Movie Magic Scheduling is such a terrible and spiteful little program. There’s got to be at least a small captive market there for someone who actually wants to try writing a replacement sober.
May 12th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
I enjoyed the visual effects PDF. Thanks for including this and all the downloads on your site.
May 19th, 2008 at 8:02 am
Your continued willingness to post these tools in your download section is something worthy of it’s own statue! The time you take to do this is appreciated beyond words. I enjoy the blog whether the content is industry driven or simply your life in general insights but I do leap for joy every time a new offering is put into your download section. They have helped me greatly not only in the writing but more importanly in the preperation to write.
Many many thanks
May 19th, 2008 at 11:43 am
@Erin, @mark:
You’re welcome. Glad it’s a help.