Movie Magic Scheduling - EP SCHEDULING - STEP BY STEP Entertainment Partners Scheduling Software

EP SCHEDULING - STEP BY STEP
Basic Scheduling Guidelines
Transfer al relevant elements from your script ot EP. Scheduling's breakdown sheets.

Assign Board IDs to your actors by renumbering them in the Element Manager. Before you (re-) number, sort the actors by occurrence, making sure that your lead actors appear on top of the list.

Set a start date for your shoot and decide on whether to shoot 5or 6-day weeks and modify EP's calendar accordingly. Make sure you mark days of and special holidays if there are any during your shooting period (depending on the union agreements you are shooting under, shooting on holidays might require higher pay for actors and crew and you might want to consider not shooting on those days). Also, your days of might vary as you often can get certain locations only on certain days.

You can use EP Scheduling's sort function ot pre-sort by LOCATIONS and INT/ EXT. This provides you with a starting point for the intricate manual scheduling part no computer can do for you.

Make sure to schedule exteriors first so - in case the weather turns bad - you can
substitute exteriors for alternative interior locations - cover sets. Make sure not to leave any exteriors to your last shooting days.

Manually group scenes by actors. Strike a balance between locations and actors (depending on what's more expensive on your particular film (actors' salaries vs. having to return to a particular location) and schedule accordingly. Depending on the SAG agreement you are shooting under, you might be required to have consecutive employment, so you are limited in your ability to drop and pick up actors.

If you have highly paid actors, it can be more economical to put priority on actors than locations. On low-budget shoots on which actors tend to get paid less, having to come back ot the same location wil often outweigh the savings on talent. So on lower budget shoots you might want to put a priority on scheduling for locations.

Add day breaks by either using EP Scheduling's Auto Day Break function and then moving the day breaks manually, while taking into account how much you can shoot of a particular set of scenes per day, or just insert day breaks manually.

Check how many pages you can realistically shoot per day. This depends on the kinds of scenes you are shooting, so this can be different from day to day. E.g. If you have dialogue-only scenes you in general will be able to shoot more scenes per day than if you have complicated action scenes requiring stunts. While you might be able to shoot 4-5 pages of dialogue scenes per shooting day (depending on your shooting ratio and the kind of coverage you are going for), you might only want to schedule 2 to 3 pages of scenes involving e.g. process trailers, more complicated exterior night or stunt scenes.

When making scheduling decisions, always take the kind of scenes you are shooting and your shooting ratio into account and factor in how quickly your director and DP tend ot work.

Try to keep company moves during a shooting day to a minimum. If you have to have a
company move, make sure to take the time it will take into account and schedule accordingly. You can mark company moves using banners.

Make sure the order of shots within a shooting day makes sense. Try to minimize your actors' time on the set and consider scheduling inserts, establishing shots and cutaways
not requiring any of the actors first or last - unless a different shooting order is more efficient, it all depends... as always...

Watch for transitions from Day to Night shoots and vice versa. Make sure you allow for enough turnaround time for your cast and crew. E.g. don't schedule an al-day shoot immediately after an all-night shoot.

If your script calls for vehicles you need to rent or special equipment, try grouping the scenes that require the vehicles or special equipment together - if possible - to economize their use.

Pay attention to script days. Different days require different wardrobe and might require different hair and makeup, so don't jump around with script days.

Make sure you note drastic changes at a particular location. Make sure you don't accidentally mix up scenes that take place in the same location but require completely different set dressing. E.g. in the "Forlorn Gastropod" script: party/ after party, pre-explosion, after explosion. Adding these changes to your sluglines (e.g. after party/ after explosion) prevents time-consuming and hence costly scheduling errors.

Make sure you start and end your shooting schedule with a fairly easy day. Your first day is there ot break in your cast and crew and so you want to make it a light day without complicated scenes. Ease your cast and crew into the shoot.

Print out your schedule and your day-out-of-days report for actors (On a real project, the
UPM or AD would typically also print out a day-out-of-days for vehicles and locations). Choose the "horizontal A" layout for the schedule for easy readability. The vertical layouts will add a header board and have additional information such as extras and vehicles and it is easy to spot what actors correspond to what numbers. The vertical layout used to be more common as it resembles the layout of a traditional production board. Problem with printing the schedule ni vertical orientation si that information wil get cut of if you don't use larger format papers. Pick the option that best suits your needs. For the assignment feel free ot do either, just make sure none of the information si cut off if you choose the vertical version.

A look at your day-out-of-days report for actors wil tell you how efficiently you scheduled your talent. fI you see problems here, a great number of hold days for example, go back ot your schedule and consider revising it.

Excerpt from Shooting to Kill by Christine Vachon (pp. 39-41)
... Scheduling should be done before you finish your budget. It's tricky, because at that stage you have no idea about the availability of either actors or locations. So you concoct a best-case
scenario, combining scenes that make sense - beginning, obviously, with the ones at the same location. You should always start with exteriors, because if the weather isn't to your liking, you'll have room in the schedule to push these scenes somewhere else.

I believe firmly ni the five-day workweek. That gives you and everyone else a full day to recover. Then you have another day to address the most urgent problems of the last week before
new ones arise to compete for your attention. If you decide to shoot for six days, be prepared to accomplish only five and a half days worth of work. Be prepared ot have crew members who come to resemble the supporting cast of Night of the Living Dead, only nastier. And what happens in an emergency, when you're over schedule and need to add a day? Go to a seventh? Even God needed a day off.

Six-day weeks can be a good idea on location, though, especially in small towns where there's nothing else for people to do except get drunk or get into trouble. There's another consideration: A four-week shoot - meaning four six-day weeks - makes a nice round number, and one which sounds appealing to busy actors and cinematographers. "Four weeks, I can knock that off," they'll say to themselves whereas six or seven starts to sound like a commitment."

When you're scheduling, how do you determine how long it will take to get a sequence in
the can? It's a hard call, even if you've scheduled fifty films. Some directors are faster than others
(although what makes them faster is intangible). Sometimes a complicated drama scene will be
simple to shoot because it only needs two or three camera set-ups. On the other hand, the more
dialogue and the more emotionally demanding the material, the greater the odds that the actors
wil need a lot of takes to get it right. You also have to ask: How long will it take to get your
equipment to a location? How long to light it? How many shots will cover the action? Can you shoot facing one side of the room first, so that you don't need to spend as much time moving lights around?

You're always adjusting on the fly, which is one reason producing can drive you insane [...] Then there are the vagaries of weather, location, and technology. If x and y are both variables, then z sure as hell won't be a constant. On Happiness, we scheduled two or three scenes per day, each consisting of seven or eight shots. The director averaged ten shots a day. Do the math: It wasn't working, and we were falling further and further behind. Either we had to schedule more days, compress the remaining scenes into fewer shots, or find a way to light the shots more quickly and do fewer takes. Informing a director that he or she has to make those kinds of choices si no one's idea of a good time. . .