How to Schedule a Film Shoot (Without Losing Your Mind)

This week I want to talk a little bit about one of the most important — yet most tedious and boring — parts of making a film: planning your schedule for your shoot.

Your schedule is probably the single most important document on any shoot day.

It aligns the team, sets expectations, and it’s the only thing that lets you know if you’re actually going to finish your film or not.

So here’s how to make a good one without killing yourself in the process.

I always keep my schedule on hand.

Schedule Logic

A good schedule for a shoot day is a balancing act. There are a lot of priorities that need to be weighed against each other.

For example:

• Time of day / Lighting. The direction the camera is shooting matters. Typically you want to shoot everything facing one direction before turning around to cover the opposite side — because that means a totally different lighting setup.
• Performance needs. Think about your actors. You don’t want to make them do a big emotional breakdown scene at 7 a.m. Typically, it’s best to shoot those scenes near the end of the day, when everyone’s naturally tired and emotions are closer to the surface. (Though it’s always good to consult the actor if it’s an especially important scene.)
• Team morale and energy. Do you have a big, complex “money shot” that requires everyone to be at 100%? Don’t save it for the end of the day when everyone’s drained.
• Meals and timing. If you schedule a complex shot right after lunch — and lunch is something heavy like pizza (which is usually a bad idea, by the way) — everyone’s going to be sluggish and sloppy.

And then there’s shot type. Typically, you want to start with your wide master shots, then move into close-ups, then inserts. That way you have a master reference for continuity and blocking. If something’s wrong with the lighting or staging, you’ll catch it before boxing yourself into continuity problems by starting on close-ups.

Company Moves

Anytime your whole team moves to a new location mid-day (called a company move), it eats up a huge chunk of time.

The goal: minimize company moves.

If possible, shoot everything you need at a location until you can wrap out that location for the whole film. It’s cleaner, faster, and way easier on morale (and the budget).

Day Length

For indie film shoots, 10-hour days are luxurious and not uncommon, but 12-hour days are standard. Any longer is a tough sell, but if that’s what it takes to finish the film, sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.

Keep in mind:

• Over 12 hours = extra meal break required.
• Crew will expect overtime pay $$.
• The crew may push back on long hours – you (or your AD) must check in with them as soon as you think you might be running long on any given day and confirm they can stick it out.
• Extended days eat into turnaround time (the rest period between days), which should be at least 10 hours — ideally 12.

Many films end up shooting 16-18hr days on occasion, but this should be a LAST resort. Besides being bad for morale, it can be quite dangerous and lead to accidents on set or while commuting home.

Make sure you pick your battles wisely here.

Racing the clock as usual.

Meal Breaks

You must break for a meal at least every 6 hours.

That’s a big reason why a 12hr day is standard – it means only 1 meal break (lunch).

By the way, for a 12-hour day, I believe a 45-minute lunch is ideal. One hour feels too long, and people may start milling around and losing focus. But only thirty minutes feels too rushed.

People need enough time to eat and also decompress a bit: check texts, make calls, and just be human for a minute, before diving back in — especially on multi-day shoots.

Setup & Wrap Time

Your first shot of the day will always take the longest. If it’s the first day at a new location, I usually plan for at least 90 minutes of setup before I expect to roll the camera (unless it’s a run & gun shoot with no lighting).

Likewise, at the end of the day, you also need to budget time for wrap:

• Dumping footage
• Cleaning up
• Loading gear

Depending on how much teardown is needed, wrap could take 15 minutes… or hours.

Make sure to schedule a “taillights” time — when you actually expect to see everyone’s cars leaving the lot — after wrap.

Automatic Scheduling

It can be tough to manage all this, so I created a “smart” spreadsheet I used to plan out my most recent short film when we had limited time shooting out of state and our scheduling had to be perfect.

The beauty of this template is being able to move around shots whenever you want and seeing all the times update automatically, meaning you can audition as many different shooting orders as you want to find what makes the most sense.

I’ve also added in “smart” shot listing, so you can make the entire pre-pro process easier on yourself by breaking it down into steps.

Best of all – these shots will automatically populate in the schedule tab as soon as you type in the shot number!

I’m so excited to finally be able to offer this all-in-one shot list and schedule workflow that saves you tons of time & energy you can use to stay creative instead.

Wrapped members have been loving it, so now I’m making it available to the email crew here for $27 this week only.

Interested? Click here to see it in action and get yours.

Quote

“It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.” – Roger Ebert

Let’s make some movies.

-Kent