How to Schedule Indie Film Production

Video Transcript

"With the crew, you know, with the cast, with the movie, you know the script, comes the scheduling and with a feature, you know, if you want to make something that's eighty to ninety minutes long, and I think to be considered a feature it has to be over like seventy five minutes. Nobody will take this thing if it's under seventy-five minutes, but I wouldn't make like a three hour movie, but if you're making an hour and a half movie when you're shooting it you should do it within as short amount as possible. So let's say you want to shoot the movie, do it within two weeks because, because you have so many actors that you're working the schedule around and the crew that you're going to work the schedule around, if there's some way you can get them within a short amount of time, and the reason for this is people will start bailing, especially if they're not getting paid. You know people just won't show up sometimes and I had this with actors like, you know, this one movie I did Addicted to Murder there were a couple of actors who were really good, I mean they were perfect for the parts, and their parts were small, and luckily I could get all their parts done within a day because I knew that they wouldn't last a couple days. That they would just get so, I don't know, sick of the movie or just not worth their time or whatever. It's just like this attitude thing and it vibed off them and I was like, oh man I've got to use them as quick as possible. So, so you know I shot them in a day and they were gone and I was like whew, you know, I got everything I needed from them again, no hassle, I mean no potential hassle because when you're doing a production you've got to think of all the things that may happen, you know, ahead of time so that's kind of built into your schedule a bit. So you've got to have some lead way because things don't work out perfectly. You've got to be flexible. So the scheduling, you've got to keep a notebook or keep a big calendar. You've got to mix and match so that's like a whole, you know, pre-production thing that's going to, you know, it's like putting together a puzzle basically and you've just got to make it work and you've got to stick with it once you're into it. So, again, try to shoot it within a short amount of time, you know, no shooting on weekends for a year because that's going to have continuity problems and all that so, so I recommend you doing a feature, just you know schedule it tight, and just you know plow through it and get it done."