AboutMichael Belanger Expertise Screenwriters in Boston, AM?
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I can answer questions about film scoring for indie film, home recording, music production and related equiptment including computers and software. I enjoy the creative and business sides of independant film making and music production.
Experience I have scored several independant films. I am part of an active film making team that creates one or two films a year. I have been actively involved with many aspects of music creation for 15 years.
Organizations I am a member of The Society of Composers and Lyricists and a partner of Mindbeside Studios (www.Mindbeside.com).
Publications Examples of my music can be streamed or downloaded from www.michaelbelanger.com and http://www.thekillinghand.com.
Expert: Michael Belanger Date: 9/18/2006 Subject: Shooting schedules-follow-up
Question
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Followup To
Question -
Good evening. I know this question is perhaps not in your line of interest but I thought I'd just try. I am a 3rd year film student from a film school in South Africa and will be shooting my graduation film in the mockumentary style in 3 weeks. I was wondering if there are any guidelines for scheduling. As the cinematographer, I want to make sure that I allocate an adequate ammount of time to each shot. Can one round it off by saying, eg. that tracking shots get half an hour, crane shots an hour, etc? Do you have any tools that you use for working out a shooting schedule?
Thank you very much
Sincerely
Nicky
Answer -
Hey Nicky,
It's great that you're taking on this project. Good luck with it. It is not easy but its worth it.
Timing for shots is something that you will learn over time. It depends on so many things that it is not really possible to ballpark it on your first time out. What you must do instead is set goals and limits for yourself.
The better your planning beforehand the smoother things will go. Having all your gear ready for the shoot and ALL of the people there at the right times will minimize some of the time slips but you should expect many problems anyway and be mentally ready to tackle them when they come up.
My suggestion is to plan one major location a day. It will take hours to get setup and provided everyone knows what they are doing, you can then run through as many of your shots as you can in the shortest time you can - provided you are getting things down the way you hoped. I would worry more about setup for each shot as opposed to the time it takes to actually shoot it. Getting the lighting right and all of the people coordinated takes some time.
Without knowing how involved your shoot will be its hard for me to help you estimate your schedule. What kind of lighting will you be using? Will you have complete control of your sets for a certain block of time? (that's usually your time limit!) Are you using an experienced DP? Are you using some experienced actors? or all volenteer amatures? Will you have your scenes blocked out and shots planned out BEFORE the shoot?
As I'm sure you know already, there's a lot to consider. Give me a high level plan for your shoot and I might be able to help you estimate your schedule. I'm no expert but I have been on a set or two and we've done it right and we've done it wrong. After your first shoot you will probably be able to answer a lot of these questions for yourself.
All the best,
Mike
Hi Mike
Thank you very much for your response.
In response to your e-amil, here are further details about my film.
We are shooting a ten minute mockumentary narrative over a period of five days. Our biggest influence is the work of Christopher Guest - A Mighty Wind, Best in Show, This is Spinal Tap. We don't have any jibbing or craning shots but we do have quite a few tracking shots for our interviews.
The lighting ratio is quite even - giving a very natural, sometimes gritty look to keep with the dockumentary incluenece.
We have approximately 80 shots in our storyboard. 40 of these are exterior day shots. These are the ones I'm most anxious about. One of the exterior garden scenes has 27 shots (it's the climax of the film in which a community Greek dance competition takes place in someone's back garden) and I'm very concerned about lighting continuity. Would it be a good idea to divide this scene over two afternoons and shoot other interior scenes in the mornings? Also, we now have the use of a scrim frame available to us. I've never used one before and I'm very nervous about it because I know we don't have time to fiddle around with gear we're not confident with, however I also know that it could improve my shots substantially. Do you have any pointers for using a scrim frame? I will read up on it as well.
We're shooting on film - I'm using Fuji Eterna 250D mainly and I have one can of Eterna 400T. I'm shooting on an Arri SR2. I do have some experience with this gear as I shot a 10 minute experimental film in April, also on film - but I'm still a baby!
All of our actors are third year film students, as well as the key crew. We do have one professional actor playing a minor role in the film.
School rules require that we use first year film students as our camera assistants so they're very green when it comes to understanding the urgency of getting things done efficiently. A small concern is that I only have one male assistant and the other two are girls. I'm not sexist (being female myself!) but it's simply a fact that boys are usually stronger - so I'm afraid that this one assistant is going to have to pull a lot of the weight when it comes to major set- ups that are more grips intensive. He has assisted me before and he's very efficient. And one of the girls has assisted me too (though she was a bit slow), and the third girl doesn't really have much confidence in what she's doing at all so I'll keep her in charge of keeping the gear station organised, holding reflector boards, bringing us water etc. I'd rather have two guys hands-on who really know what they're doing.
We have the garden scenes and the garage scene on the same location, a small office scene takes place on location 5 minutes away, and then we have three other locations, some of which are half an hour away.
The actors are rehearsing and we shoot in a week's time. I'm very nervous!
If any other advice springs to mind I'd be grateful to hear it.
Thanks again
Sincerely
Nicky
Answer Mike,
The following links are some explanations of how to use a scrim. http://www.jorenclark.com/whitepapers/scrim.html
http://www.dvformat.com/2003/10_oct/tutorials/lighting201p32.htm. The dvformat.com link seems to be the better of the two.
If her outdoor scenes are short enough then I would recommend shooting it all in one afternoon. This will ensure continuity with here lighting through-out the scene. Weather can be very unpredictable as we both know. It sounds like she has a everything pretty well sorted out.
Let me know if this helps. If she has any more questions I would be more than happy to answer them.
Thanks
Andy
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Hi Nicky,
I'm not a director or DP or anything like that so I don't have specific advice on scrims or lighting but I just forwarded your question to a director friend of mine. I'll post his answer for you. I do have some over all advice about production that I hope you find helpful. We learned the hard way by doing things wrong at first but over time we figured things out. The info below is intended to give you some insight into some of the things that we uncovered that helped us out a low.
Every shoot can be very nerve wracking. You'll get through it. The little things that will go wrong don't usually show in the film.
I don't think you can really estimate time for each shot given the amount of things you have planned.
Thoughts: You are using a limited amount locations. This will help keep things moving. You have good instincts on shuffling the shoots to have the lighting look similar for several shots but I would worry probably keep the location switching to a minimun and do what you can to light it the same way. You would need to have more flexibility in your schedule to make moving locations to fit the lighting really work. That said, there are only so many hours in a day.
I would focus on making sure you have everyone in the right place at the right time, get your shot list as organized as possible, planninng the order that requires the least setup changes possible.
The other big thing is going to work against you is getting all of the setup done in the time you have projected. It's important that early in the shoot, you eat up too much time doing setups, all the while thinking that you have plenty of time. You don't. Your whole crew has to act like you are always behind schedule because at some point you will be. This happens to EVERYONE. So minimize the impact by being tough on everyone up front about when things MUST be ready for each setup.
Tips to keep your shoot running smoothly:
1. Meet with your core group several times before the shoot to go over what is needed at your shoot
2. Create hard lists of every peice of equipment needed and have the right people report back to you that everything on the list is ready to go. On the day of the shoot each person with a list runs through it to make sure the correct gear is packed and ready. No tool, prop, gadget, wire, tape, pole etc. is too small to track on these lists. I've been on shoots where someone had to drive 2 hours to pick up a stupid thingy that so and so was supposed to bring but didn't. The most important thing here is that you don't have the time for these kinds of interuptions.
3. list all shots in the order they will be filmed with a list of who is involved with each shot. This unloads a lot of wasted space in your brain during the shoot. You can focus on the film. NOTE: Take a second to check off each shot as they are completed so you'll know you did it. It's very easy to miss a shot when you're tired. We missed 2 very important establishing shots in our latest project because someone got over confident about this list and didn't bother to check things off every time we did a shot.
4. During pre shoot planning. Ask a million questions to your core group until they can't stand talking to you. You'll uncover problems that they are worried about beforehand and not when it's too late. Assume that every one of your team has forgotten something and that they are hiding a potential problem from you that the think they can handle. It's your shoot so don't apologize for wanting it to be perfect.
5. Periodically check your time and estimate how far behind you are.
6. Don't hesitate to have the student actors join the film crew when they're standing around waiting for their scene. The pro actors we work with do this without anyone asking them. The one's that don't usually have other issues anyway that prevent us from hiring them again. Our projects are all volenteer, at the indie level everyone does everything they can to help each other. This will be different when we are making films with a real budget and distribution, but we'll have a paid crew then anyway.
Don't forget to have fun and remember that most people are doing this because they love it and are working very hard for your project.
