FILM PROJECT 2 – Pre-shoot Planning

My shoot is on Sunday so I’ve been planning for the big day. I’ve mapped out each scene, who will be in it, and what time I’d ideally like to shoot each scene. As mentioned earlier, shooting in ‘golden hour’ is very important to me, however with daylight savings changing on Saturday night and a moderately tight schedule for a couple of my actors, its gonna be tough to block everything out perfectly.

To me the two most important scenes in terms of lighting are the opening scene with John & the Dealer, and the final scene on the street with the boys kicking the footy. A nice warm, pre-sunset light would make these scenes really nice, but obviously I can’t shoot them chronologically due to time constraints. So here is my proposed plan, along with list of props required, and crew. (I’ve taken a screenshot as opposed to formatting it on here, these blogs are terrible format wise!)

As you can see, a fairly good plan, but with a lot of room to move. If some of my actors need to leave early etc. I’ll be able to accommodate that hopefully!

I’ve considered a few possible roadblocks that could happen on Sunday, here they are.

• Weather. If it is raining on Sunday, we may be in trouble. It would put a huge squeeze on our timing but hopefully it should be fine, at least according to the BOM. I wouldn’t mind shooting in the rain but I’m worried about the equipment getting wet (boom mics, cameras etc.), and we don’t have enough crew to hold umbrellas sadly. Let’s hope it doesn’t get to this.
• Music playing next door. I have some fairly noisy neighbours, who like to DJ during the day, playing loud house and techno music. Usually I’m all for it, but if they happen to be doing it on Sunday it could seriously mess with our audio during the outdoor scenes. We can either move it inside, which I hope we don’t have to, or simply ask them to turn it down which is embarrassing but a solution.
• Run out of time / light. This is another possibility, as you never really know at this amateur stage just how long everything will take. As you can see from my schedule, I’m starting fairly late in the day as to best take advantage of the lighting, leaving me only so many hours in the day before sunset. Obviously I want to utilise that light, but it could be that we simply don’t shoot it all. I have given us a lot of time and we really don’t have much shooting to do, so again, hopefully it doesn’t come to this. If it does we may simply have to do re-shoots which will be a huge pain but not impossible.