How To Schedule Your Indie Film Shoot

Because film budgets are extremely dependent on how many days you’re shooting, and because you don’t want to come out of this process in debt and without all your footage, today, we’re making you a shooting schedule. Every production and team is different, of course, and it may take some time (maybe even a production or two) to figure out exactly what works for you and your people, but ultimately, all films start from the same scheduling logic.

First, of course, you need to break down your script. If you need a template for that, I got you covered! Once you have that, it’s time to start making groups of commonalities. This is why it’s so useful to break down a script in a spreadsheet- you can filter your sheet by the following categories to make it easier to start finalizing things.

How to filter sensible shooting days:

1. First, by location. There’s nothing more complicated than a company move, or having to move your cast and crew and equipment from one place to another during a shoot day. And that doesn’t necessarily mean the location tag from your script- you might be able to film multiple location tags within the same geographic map pin with some planning ahead. In my web series Brains, we had a number of sequences from a number of episodes set in various hallways, and though they were technically different hallways… they were hallways. So we camped out (semi-illegally) in an empty building on our grad school campus on the weekend and shot all hallway episodes in a single day, just moving up or down a floor to get some distinct characteristics.
2. Second, by character. The fewer shooting days an actor has, the better, especially for low budget productions. If it looks like you’re going to be filming multiple days inside one apartment location, for example, group those days by which actors are needed, so an actor doesn’t have to show up for an hour one day, an hour the next. You can’t always avoid this, but when you can, do.
3. Third, by complexity. Lots of filmmaking resources like to give you hacks like “one script page is one minute on screen and will take an hour to film” which is nonsense. That’s a fully meaningless metric and any producer worth their crafty knows this. Just because three action-heavy scenes are short on the page doesn’t mean you can feasibly (and safely) shoot them all at once the way you shot that three page scene of static dialog. It also means you want to avoid doing multiple stunt-heavy, camera-move-heavy scenes in a single day, to preserve team morale, energy, and creativity. I like to pair a single massively complex sequence, or two medium complexity sequences, with a mostly sitting-and-talking rest of the day.

This “Day Breakdown” will give you a first look at how long your project will take to shoot and how many days each actor and location is needed. You can then see how much, in general, it will cost, if you’re planning on paying your actors or renting a location, and then that’ll help you prioritize cuts.

The above system isn’t foolproof: sometimes, I’m sorry to say, it’s actually more cost effective to prioritize cutting actor days than cutting company moves; it all just depends on your unique circumstances and how far your company has to move in the first place. Also, actor schedules can be chaotic, especially when you aren’t paying them to prioritize you in return. Sometimes, the only functional schedule is an inefficient one, so you have to decide: is the cost of inefficiency worth completing this project with these people/this plan? Only you can answer that.

If it’s not one script page = one hour on set… what’s the math?

If your script is dialog-heavy and stationary, with seasoned performers and a director with at least one successful (see: complete) project under their belt, three pages of dialog between two actors may take 30 minutes to shoot three pieces of coverage (medium, medium, wide). This calculation comes from the knowledge that the actors will need fewer adjustments or cuts before the end of a take, the overall shot complexity is low (they’re seated or standing, no major camera moves or actor blocking), and the director is experienced enough not to micromanage their performers.

Things that take longer than you think to shoot:

1. Outdoor scenes. Considerations: getting to them, because not all outdoor locations have addresses for easy GPS directions; setting up, because you’ll have fewer amenities like outlets to charge or plug lights into, bathrooms, and safe places to put equipment and props; and shooting, because you’re at the whims of nature and the public and therefore have less control of the temperature, weather, noise, and space than you might in a locked off set or indoor location.
2. Moving scenes. Considerations: camera moves, even basic ones, require timing between the camera operator as well as the performers, sound technician, and any other number of variables, which means even the shorted motion can take a few tries to get right. Actor moves/blocking, even with the camera is locked, can be tricky for the same reason. You also may end up wanting more time for rehearsal in order to coordinate all the disparate pieces to execute what, on page, seems like a straightforward sequence. This includes intimacy scenes.
3. Monologue scenes. Considerations: if you want to capture a performance without cutting away, it’ll take some time, even with a well-rehearsed performer, to get things exactly right. You’ll need it to be perfect from start to finish before moving on; unlike the fluidity of the stage, where a performance is live and quirks can be integrated into a larger context of experiencing it in the moment with an audience, a film is designed to stand by itself in every context and only one final canon performance. That’s a lot of pressure! If you want to capture the performance with the option of cutting away, there’s still a lot to coordinate to ensure continuity between takes, like ensuring any actor movement is repeated (if they lift their shoulder at a certain line in the master shot, they need to be lifting that shoulder in that same spot in all the other coverage) and ensuring the tone and volume of the performance can match multiple takes when edited together as a single speech.
4. Crowded scenes. Considerations: every new person in a scene, especially if they have even one line of dialog, is usually at least one added shot of coverage. So even a relatively short scene can quickly get complicated the more people appear on screen, just to ensure your editor has the coverage they need to put it all together. Plus, the special alchemy of having more cooks in the kitchen, even if they’re all highly skilled and professional, can sometimes lead to unexpected delays.

All of this and more goes into the unique calculus of how many shooting days your particular script requires. If you need help with that, I do script auditing to help you narrow things down.

How do you structure your days themselves? That’s shot listing territory. And which shots should you choose in the first place? I’ve got you covered there too.

Bri Castellini is an independent filmmaker, a romance author, and, regrettably, a podcaster. She’s known for the 2017 short film Ace and Anxious (writer/director, 165k+ views on YouTube) and for her podcasts Burn, Noticed and Breaking Out of Breaking In, covering the USA television show Burn Notice and practical filmmaking advice, respectively. She can lick her elbow (not clickbait). Full work history and ways to hire her as a consultant can be found on her website BriCastellini.com