How to Schedule Movie Scenes

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Rhett Reiger from White Caspian Studios on behalf of Expert Village. I'm going to talk for a minute about break downs. Now this is something that is primarily handled by another crew member, typically a script supervisor, or a production assistant. And they work very very closely with the director. But the director has to be involved in this process, because they're making a lot of notes and they're adding things and taking things away. The schedule, which is obvious, a shooting schedule, which should be printed out. A lot of times it's done on computers. This is basically a breakdown of all of the scenes and the actors in those scenes and where they're going to be and when they're going to do it. So there's just millions and millions of notes that have been taken. Now on the breakdown sheet we're going from scene to scene to scene. The director is going to look at the script, find the scene. Take for examples this one, scene forty-one. We have a name, 'character goes to bar', and this is the cast and they're going to talk about what he's wearing and any things in the scene that are significant. For example a parked car, his clothing, is there something in his hand, what he's doing, if anything is going to change with him that scene. You must do a breakdown sheet for every scene and possibly even parts of a scene. Because when it comes down to it, and you're shooting, sometimes sixteen hours a day, things can get very confusing and you can forget who's doing what. If you always have a log book to go back to, to check, you will always know this is what we had going on, this is what occurred in that scene. And so we know if we have to go back and match a shot, we can do that."