 Hey, what is up? My name is Rubidium. Today, we are talking about scheduling about how quickly or slowly a film crew can move, how long you need to shoot a particular movie, what you need, and how to go about preparing for that. That seems very convoluted, but basically it breaks down to how quickly you can tell the story that you want to tell, depending on how many resources you have at your disposal. So the three big ways that filmmakers keep track of what they're shooting is shots, setups, and pages. Now, shots I think everyone can kind of get. If you set up the camera, you put a lens on, you say, the director says action, the actors do their thing, and that's a shot. That's one continuous shot. That shot may be an insert of someone putting a coffee cup down on a table. It may be a very complicated one take of someone putting the bomb in the trunk of a car and then craning up and then walking along, like in Orson Welles' famous one in Touch of Evil. So that's still one shot, but I'd say that wonors and moving masters, and we'll talk about those later, are the exception rather than the rule. Most of the time people, filmmakers build their story through a series of distinct individual shots that they put together in post-production in the edit to tell their story. You press record, later on you press stop, that's one shot. If you change the lens, so you go from a 24 to a close-up of 85 and get another shot, because the camera and the lights and the actors still in the place they were before, it's not another set up, it's just another shot. Oh, I should mention that there are also takes. If you don't change anything, leave the same lens on, leave the same lighting, the actors do the same thing, it's just another take, it's not another shot. When you change the lens or adjust the lighting or maybe adjust the blocking, that's another shot. When you move the camera and move the lighting, that's another set up. So the first set up could be a single on the lead actor, the second one is going to be a two shot on the lead actor and the supporting actor or the villain, whatever it is. So now you're moving the camera, which means you almost always have to move the lights. Now you're at another set up and different types of crews are able to do more or fewer set ups in one day. A typical TV show that's shooting on the same sets and has the same lighting and sort of has established a working template for their day can do about 20 or 30 distinct set ups in one day, one day of filming might be a 10 hour, might be a 12 hour day. So that means that they're doing, you know, 15 before lunch, 15 after lunch, or they're doing 10 before lunch and then after lunch when they really get going, they're doing another 20 feature films. We're talking, you know, 10 million and up are probably doing about 10 to 15 a day. So that's because on a feature film, the there's no established path of doing things, the sets are all new and usually unlit. You might be shooting on locations exterior that require, you know, hours and hours of setup time for each setup. And cinema typically has high production values, meaning the producer wants more for their money. Like they want, you know, five or six lights on every actor rather than two or three, like you would on television. That's, I mean, golden native television and the money that Netflix and those kind of people spends on TV makes it look like movies and they're spending a lot of money to get that. But so you have a 20 to 30 setup, you have a sort of 20 to 30 setups a day on a TV show and 10 to 20, if that on a feature film. But those shots and setups and takes don't don't really help you get through your film until they translate into pages, meaning pages of the script that you've covered in all the ways that the director wants you to cover them. So they talked about eights of a page and on a film set, the script supervisor will keep track of this. How many eights of a page have you shot that day? You might do four eighths of a page, half a page, you might do seven eighths of a page or almost a page, you might do three pages a day. If you take the amount of pages of the script and you divide it by the amount of days you have to shoot, you'll know what your average page number has to be. And again, on TV, it's different than feature films on TV. It's about eight to 10 pages a day. So you'll shoot a one hour pilot in about six days on a feature film. It's about two to three pages a day. So you'll shoot a feature in over a couple of months. And that's because the crews are bigger, the scenes are more complicated, and there's no pre-established set way of doing things. I mean, think about House MD. It was the same four people, five people. It was the same hospital set. It was already probably lit. Actors already knew their characters. So there wasn't probably that much back and forth with the director. And these guys, they would just go in and, you know, shoot 15 pages a day. But on a feature film, I mean, think of Black Panther, how complicated the stunts are, how many moving pieces there are, and how good Marvel wants that final film to look. And you end up spending months and months shooting these things and spending $200 million getting it in the can or getting it made. You know, it takes shots, setups and pages are never as simple as they seem because you can do a three page scene in one take, meaning one setup, very, very easily. Or, you know, if you have it on a either, you know, a locked off two shot, or you have it on a steady camera or movie, and you follow the two actors or three actors walking through the scene, you know, you can spend the entire day lighting and prepping and rehearsing and then, you know, come four o'clock, you hit action, do one take, fix a couple of things, do a second take, you've got it, everyone goes home a couple of hours early. And you've got three pages in the can and you're ahead of your schedule. It doesn't always happen like that, things can go wrong. And typically you don't really want to shoot a whole movie in single takes, just because it really limits your flexibility when it comes to the edit to make decisions after you've shot the film. So, one is a great, and we'll probably do an episode on those coming up, but it really, you really have to have immense confidence and the actors have to be really well rehearsed and really well blocked in order to pull these things off in one go. So the preferred method is to do multiple takes with multiple setups, meaning coverage from both sides and a master. And we'll talk about what coverage is versus, you know, moving masters later, but essentially that's how scheduling breaks down in films. You want to get as many pages as you can every day, meaning all the shots you need to cover those scenes and move on so you don't have to go back and get anything else. While keeping the film the quality that you want it to be. So John Woo, one of my favorite filmmakers, is a perfect example with Hard Boiled. Now, if you think that a Hollywood movie might have a three-month production schedule, Hard Boiled had a 120-day shoot. This is in the 80s in Hong Kong when filming was comparatively very, very cheap. So they were able to shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot with like, you know, every time a guy, you know, jumps over a table firing a gun, John Woo would get, they have three cameras and get seven or eight or nine or 10 different versions of it. So that when he was in post, he could cut between them and create a really dynamic, amazing film. When he then went to Hollywood and was forced to work under those kind of constraints with those kind of production costs, he wasn't able to deliver as great and as dynamic films as he did when he was working in Hong Kong. But that's the reality of making films. I hope that's been helpful for people out there. We're going to dive into some of these other related topics about how you make films at a, you know, larger, bigger scale, how films get made in Hollywood, how films get made in independence in New York. And this is going to be hopefully part of a series. So thank you very much for watching. I will see you next time.