The Indie Auteur Musings on filmmaking by Stephan Vladimir Bugaj.

Hitchhiker observations, part 1: Planning and Scheduling

Among my many current projects is helping my friends Emma (Director) and Brandon (Producer) make Emma’s film Hitchhiker. In addition to providing an opportunity to collaborate with a talented, enjoyable group of people to work with, Hitchhiker can also provide some valuable lessons on “no-budget” (ultra low budget, which I set as less than approx. $500/minute of footage) filmmaking. Here are a few:

Preproduction Is Your Friend

Many a no-budget project has failed by simply falling apart due to lack of planning. My ongoing serial project has had problems with preproduction which I’ve been trying to address, but it is difficult to get collaborators excited about that phase of production, so it can be slow going. But it’s worth the time. Every hour spent on preproduction may very well save you two hours in production.

Creating things like script break downs, call sheets, location scouting reports, storyboards, and so on may seem like a luxury, but they are in fact a necessity. Good preproduction involves nailing down all the variables you can think of, so that you’re not completely out of your depths when something comes along that you didn’t think of. And, contrary to what some believe, preproduction doesn’t limit your on-set creativity. Rather, only through proper planning can you truly get creative on-set and make radical changes, because your planning gives you a stable base to fall back on when the new ideas go haywire.

Beat-boards (storyboards with only one key panel per shot) are an excellent and cost-effective preproduction tool that can make not only on-set life so much easier, but many other aspects of preproduction (selecting lenses, lights, and grip gear; spotting for props; making call sheets for cast; location scouting; and in our case, planning the rear-projection shots and acquiring the plates) and postproduction as well. Even simple beat-boards like the ones Emma did for Hitchhiker can give you a lot of bang for very little (or no, if you can draw your own) bucks:

All the “boring” up-front planning is part of the filmmaking process, not something that gets in the way of it. The better (and more complete) job you do in preproduction, the better your results will be.

Keep It Simple

Something I’m particularly bad at is keeping my short films simple. Hitchhiker is quite simple, and it’s going much more smoothly than some of my shoots for it. There are four actors in the whole piece, only two of which have had to appear for more than two shoot days, and there aren’t any set pieces, period clothes, or stunts. The outdoor dialog (outdoor dialog being the bane of no-budget shooting) is less than half the dialog in the film, and more than half of it takes place in a single location (inside a car). To avoid the problems of shooting (and sound recording) in a moving car, those shots will be done with the car in a building and the world outside the car being done via rear projection (which is easy to do if you don’t mind it looking like rear projection).

One way in which Hitchhiker seems less simple is the number of shots. If you count the rear-projection plates, there are over 170 shots from 9 pages of script. Many of these are reversals and same-as shots. This reduces the number of lighting set-ups to something closer to 30 (though that can balloon as lighting is subsequently tweaked on a per-shot basis “just a little bit here and there”).

There are two ways to shoot a sequence that is a series of reversals: shoot long continuous takes and then create the cuts in editing (doing one side of a reversal first, then the other) or call cut at the end of each shot (again, focusing on one side, and therefore one lighting set-up, first). Which one you can get away with depends on your actors, your style, and your own abilities. While you’ll probably get through more footage in a day if you can do continuous takes and then create the necessary shots in editing, doing this requires that the Actors and Director can deliver on this. The natural pacing that stems from this approach can be good, but the Director needs to guide the actors to deliver the scenes in a way that allows the editor to actually cut-away. If the Director and/or Actors can’t nail the right balance of pacing, or the Actors can’t remember the lines for the whole sequence (not all no-budget films manage to score experienced actors), you may be forced to cut at the end of each shot. Some Directors prefer the less naturalistic feel you get from doing discontinuous takes. In a highly stylized film, that may work best. And given time and ability, some Directors will do the continuous takes and then go back and do some or all of the shots discontinuous. Doing both creates more editing options, but can definitely can wear out a cast and crew. Director and Producer must work together to find the right fit given the abilities of their cast and crew and the specific needs of a given project.

On Hitchhiker, since Emma is working with improv actors, there has been more of a skew to let things roll and do continuous takes when camera angles are exactly the same across cuts specified in the boards. We haven’t done the main dialogue sequences (in a car, with rear projection behind) yet, so it remains to be determined if this approach will hold up — but if it does, for this particular project, it seems like the right choice.

Sometimes, Weird Stuff Happens

Especially if you’re a no-budget operation, your shoot schedule will almost certainly be blown at some point by weird stuff. On Hitchhiker we lost a shooting evening because a building caught fire across the street from the gas station where we were shooting. There was no plan in place for shooting different sequences should something go wrong with the location, so we all went home. When we lost this night, we were already re-shooting some shots that were previously wrecked by equipment failure. Because no-budget cast and crew members have other jobs, we didn’t have the cast members on-call for alternate options. Add slop time into your no-budget schedule for weird stuff to occur (in other words, book more shooting time than you think you’ll need — but not too much more, because you need to maintain good will with your unpaid cast and crew).

An entire weekend also had to be rescheduled due to an error in location scouting, resulting in at least a one month delay in the shooting schedule (because everyone has other jobs and projects). With no-budget filmmaking, preparation time is the only luxury you really have. Not only should you do careful preproduction (which Emma and Brandon did), you should also come up with plans for how to avoid losing whole days to random events (like fires) or mistakes you made in the original planning (like missing some small details that make a location ultimately unsuitable when the time comes to actually use it). Even in bigger budget filmmaking, it is best to always have contingency plans and fall-backs (for locations, actors, scenes to shoot in a given day, etc.), but in tiny budget filmmaking it can be essential. You need to spend a lot of energy keeping the cast and crew going when you hit speed bumps like this (I know from an ongoing serial project I’m working on, which has had several long spells of stagnant momentum), and it can be draining, especially on the Director and Producer. It’s better to try to avoid it in the first place.

People Eat Food

No-budget filmmaking thrives on volunteer efforts. Without people’s willingness to chip-in to make your project, it’s just not going to happen. Failing to feed people is, according to a couple veteran Indie Producers I’ve talked to, the number one cause of No and Low Budget projects completely falling apart. Considering how important it is, that’s an easy lesson to learn: make sure that you always set-aside time and money to feed your cast and crew. Period. No excuses. Fortunately for the project, Emma and Brandon are all over the food thing (though making your crew have to submit receipts to get repaid for some meals can become quite a pain when the size of the crew gets over 4 – 6 people).

Your Crew Have Other Jobs

Another thing that Hitchhiker production (mostly) got right is to understand that your volunteer crew isn’t earning a living from making your movie for free, and to take that into account. Except for a couple late weekdays, we’ve shot almost entirely on weekends or Friday nights, and generally ended early on Sunday. It is essential to accommodate your all-volunteer cast and crew in terms of their paid jobs, and also to understand that there may be other “resume builder” projects they’re going to work on after yours. If you don’t accommodate their work schedules, you’ll quickly lose cast and crew who need their day jobs to pay rent and buy food. Exhaustion sets in quickly, the people who stick it out despite the excessive demands will inevitably do a worse job than they otherwise would — and your production will suffer. Going past your allotted calendar time will cause people to vanish off into other projects that they’re working on. Hitchhiker has done a good job of avoiding the former, but has stepped on the landmine of the latter. It will be a challenge to schedule the last two shooting days, which have been pushed-back at least a month.

So Give Yourself Enough Time

Take the number of locations, set-ups, and overall shots, and make a shooting plan. Then, if you’re in a no-budget situation, factor in the fact that most of your cast and crew are inexperienced and therefore will inevitably be slow and make mistakes. Add to that a buffer that allows you to let people enjoy themselves, so they’ll want to help you again (and you’ll want to do it again), and then buffer that based on the assumption that you’ll mess up enough to burn at least 20% of your time. Do all that, and you’ve got yourself a no-budget schedule. So long as you can afford to buy food for all those shoot days (and rent any equipment you need, which if you’re a no-budget novice hopefully is basically nothing), and your schedule fits within your budget.

A mistake most inexperienced no-budget filmmakers make in scheduling (and in using their time) is to forget that set-up will be slow with an inexperienced crew (especially as they get tired — nobody but a triathlete or soldier comes into the business prepared for late night shoots and early next day calls). This leads to slow set-ups and rushed shots. That leads to getting into the editing room with only bad takes. Give yourself the time to do safety takes, and maybe even an alt here and there. Rehearse, learn your actors’ styles, and plan your schedule to allow your particular actors run the scene as many times as is comfortable to them. Don’t overdo it and shoot 40 takes of each shot (time is cheap as a no-budget filmmaker, but it’s not free — especially with borrowed locations), but generally moving on after 2 or 3 takes isn’t recommended until you’ve really gotten a feel for what is and isn’t a truly good take. It’s emotionally difficult to let actors do a safety take (and many will always want “just one more” — and feel unsatisfied if you never let them have it) when slow set-ups are dragging down your schedule, so make sure your schedule is realistic given your (and your crew’s) skill level.

Hitchhiker, a nine page script, will have shot over at least six full days, with at least five additional partial days. One day’s footage had to be re-shot due to camera problems. Three days had to be rescheduled due to problems on location. The original schedule was eight shooting days — a reasonable amount for a nine page script, even with a pretty small crew. Problems arose which caused the schedule to become scattered, but because of the good preproduction that was done (boards about what was to be shot, breakdowns and call sheets per sequence, etc.), it was relatively easy to flex the schedule based on the issues that arose.

Project Crew: Emma, Brandon, Dani, Austin, Danielle, Erick, Victor, Susan, Jesus, Jason, Jose, Sarah, Rebecca