In the past few weeks we have learnt certain skills and techniques in class about how to create and use a script on a film shoot. I decided to bring those skills and techniques to a small project of my own to see how it was working in a different environment.

The team that I worked with I have worked with on multiple occasions so already we know how each other works and we work well together. Generally though, we have an idea that we loosely all understand and then we work out everything else while we’re shooting. Obviously it’s not the most efficient way of working but its done well in the past. By changing things up and working more on the pre-production and the use of scripts and marking them up was different and difficult at first, mainly because it’s not the exciting bit and you just want to go out and film something, but nevertheless, I stuck at it and found a few revelations.

First off, it almost halves your production time something I couldn’t really learn from the small exercises that we do at school. By giving an actor a full script instead of saying “say something like . . .” the actor seems more confident in less takes and although I don’t like the way that it restricts a few creative freedoms it definitely helps to streamline the process. By giving your crew the mark up of a script and listing exactly what shots you want you can move quicker then when you’re trying to picture what shot should come next. So what would’ve taken a whole weekend to film actually only took us about 6 hours, which is such a great thing to know now that free time to film is dwindling in the midst of uni and work.

Another thing that surprised me was the amount of input I got from my crew when we were marking things up. I would’ve thought that me providing the finished script wouldn’t have aloud the others to add their creative input however I decided to have a read through with the actors and crew where we could mark up our individual scripts with what was needed like we had done in a few of the class exercises. Surprisingly, I would even go so far as to say there was more creative input when we were marking the script up than when ideas were just thrown around during the shoot.

Finally in post production, as I was learning in the class exercises, by having a marked up script to go to when editing together the shots made that process so much quicker as well.

I guess the main negative that I found is that even though you save time on the shoot you gain time in pre-production, which is good for the crew but bad for you when you’re up in the early hours of the morning trying to finish the script before your shoot! It does also take away those few strikes of brilliance that you get when you’re actually on location, things you can only really think of when you’re there.

In conclusion, its probably best to use the pro’s of each style and morph them together in order to create a successful shoot.