It may seem like everything is happening all at once, and that on-set production is total chaos rather than a pipeline.  But this is only true if you let it get out of hand.  When you’re inexperienced, your production simply will get out of hand at times and you’ll just need to get it back on track.  To help you do so, it helps to understand what things basically ought to look like if they’re going right, so here’s an overview of on-set production as a process.  What is especially helpful about this is that while the actual on-set activity may sometimes seem overwhelming and frenzied, when looked at as a process the structure of on-set production is relatively simple.  Knowing this pipeline can help you focus and bring things back under control when something goes wrong.

On-set production process

Crew Call; Location, Grip and Lighting Work

The day starts with a crew call.  On many sets, the Director and Producer may not even be on set at this point — particularly if there is a location move involved.  The First A.D., Line Producers, Location Manager, Key Grip, and Gaffer are responsible for getting the location moved and equipment ready.  Other services, such as portable toilets if needed and craft services, are also expected to arrive early.  The camera crew (often without the D.P.) arrive to start prepping and testing the camera.  When the D.P. is scheduled to arrive, the camera crew, grips, and gaffers are expected to be ready to start putting lights and cameras onto the proper grip gear and into position for the first shot of the day.  If sets need to be constructed, the Set Foreman heads this up, and the arrival of the Art Director is the cue for set dressing to begin.  All the mechanical aspects of prepping the set are expected to more or less be done before the cast arrives.

The Director (and Producer) may choose to oversee any and all of this, of course.  It depends on the level of trust you have with your crew.  Very experienced Directors with experienced crews, particularly ones they’ve worked with before, trust everyone to work from the boards, previs, set blueprints, art packets, and so on that the Director has already approved in preproduction — and the Director makes occasional walkthroughs during initial setup to make sure all is well, or decide on last minute changes when inspiration strikes.  Otherwise, the Director focuses on working with the actors (and, if necessary, the writer — see below).

Script and Storyboard Revisions

On-set script and storyboard revisions happen for one of two reasons: the Director has a flash of inspiration, or disaster has struck.  In the former case, it is dependent upon the Director’s personality (and the extent of the change) whether to bother with script and board changes or to just give verbal adjustments to the cast and crew.   In the case of disaster — whether it’s a scene or sequence that just isn’t working, a cast member has quit (or, God forbid, become too sick to work or passed away), or the production has fallen so far behind schedule that major portions of the script need to start getting cut — it is best for all involved to get the changes down.  It will help mitigate the chaos of the disaster, and the comfort of seeing the changes committed to paper will enable you to more easily get back on track.

Cast Call and Cast-Director Check-in

By the time the cast is scheduled to arrive, the set is expected to be ready for them.  The First A.D. and Production Assistants will check the arrival of the cast, make sure they get call sheets, answer questions, bring them water and snacks, and generally get them settled-in before the Director arrives to go over the day’s shooting.  Not all sets bother to (or can afford to) give the cast and Director time before the shooting starts, but if you can make it happen, it’s a great idea.  It allows the cast to ask questions and give suggestions to the Director in a more intimate environment.  Some actors don’t feel comfortable either seeming to need help, or giving suggestions to (or being critical of) the Director, in front everyone.  Time spent alone can enable a freer exchange of ideas, and help diffuse potential issues before they become a big deal.

Wardrobe, Hair and Make-Up

Once a cast member is on-set and informed of the day’s work, they will get their hair and make-up done, and wardrobe fitted.  This may happen before or after the Director check-in, and if the preparations are especially complicated (which may be the case for special effects make-up or elaborate period costumes), the cast call may be at exactly the same time as the crew call (unless, of course, a location move has happened and the wardrobe, hair and make-up trailers or rooms are being prepped), and the actors may be in wardrobe, hair and make-up the whole time the technical set-up is happening.

Actual Shooting

Before the cameras roll, five main things happen:

Lights (1), Camera (2), and Grip gear (3) are set-up.  For the first shot, things are supposed to be pretty close when the cast arrives, but the D.P. still needs to visually inspect the shot with the actual cast in-place, take light readings, and make any necessary adjustments to the lighting and camera rigs before shooting.  When a new shot is started, things may change radically.  This is when the cast and many other members of the crew get a break (or, in the case of the cast or a crew lead who needs Directorial input, perhaps go talk with the Director) as the camera crew, gaffers and grips work fast and furious to get the next shot ready.

Sound gear is set-up (4).  This basically consists of the boom operator getting into proper position, and the recordist doing level checks.  To make this work as it should, the boom operator has been in rehearsals with the cast, is present for all on-set warm-ups, and gets informed of any updates to dialog and timing.  If that’s happening, an experienced boom operator can get set-up without having to ask for run-throughs  before the actual shooting.

All the parts of this set-up that requires interaction with the cast are expected to happen very quickly, so the cast spends minimal time worrying about technical issues and maximal time acting.

Shot Direction is given (5).  Once the set-up is finished, the Director gives the final directions to the cast and crew.  If it’s not the first take, then refinement directions are given — or the call is made that a good take has been achieved and it’s time to move on to the next shot.

Once all the set-up is done, and Direction given, the First A.D. calls “action”.  Then the cameras roll, almost always for a very short period of time, and then the Director calls “cut”.  That’s it.  You just shot a take.  This process happens again and again until the shooting day is done.  In between takes, it’s just the Director giving direction and occasional technical tweaks (and/or touch-up on wardrobe, hair and make-up).  In between shots, it’s just somewhat longer versions of the same thing.  Sure, throughout the day there are meal and restroom breaks, longer set-ups during which some people get to take a break, and so on — but a shooting day is basically this over and over again: technical set-up / adjustment, cast and crew direction given, and roll cameras.

Once you’ve done that for as many days as scheduled for shooting the entire film — have a wrap party, because now you’re ready to go into post production.

Production — before going on-set

Production before going on-set includes the tail end of pretty much everything in preproduction.  Indeed, the distinction between late preproduction and early production is debated.  If you mark a production greenlight as the start of production (as some studios do), then it’s early production.  But if you mark the first shooting day as the start of production (as others do), then it’s late preproduction.  Either way, the tasks you must perform are the same.

Casting, Wardrobe, Make-Up Tests, Rehearsals, Camera Tests with Talent

Sign those final contracts with all your remaining actors as quickly as you can, because your schedule depends on it (and depending how large a percentage your casting cost estimate is relative to the rest of your budget, you may not be able to budget for crew and materials until you do this).  The final casting is also needed so you can start rehearsing (and doing those last script tweaks before hitting the set), fitting costumes (and working with the production designer to refine any costumes that aren’t working now that the real talent is selected), doing make-up tests, using real talent in camera tests to start finalizing lighting and film stock choices (some talent, particularly big names, won’t allow this — and/or you can’t afford it), getting to know people so you can develop a working rapport with them, and (and this is serious with regards to primary cast and crew) finding out about dietary restrictions before starting the process of hiring a caterer.  Rehearse as much as you can (unless you or your lead are the kind of folks who absolutely hate rehearsing — in which case, I hope you’re both excellent under pressure).

Crew Casting

You’re about to go shoot a movie.  On-set work is the post people intensive part of the filmmaking process, and now you’ve got to go out and hire the entire rest of the crew (actually, the production staff and department leads you hired in preproduction do).  For a large budget film, you may be about to hire and schedule several hundred people.  Everyone from the most senior craftsmen and technicians to the lowliest P.A. need to be signed-on now so that legal and payroll can get them on the books, and production (First A.D. and Line Producers) can get them onto the schedule, and production accounting can start itemizing this part of the budget.  In reality, big productions do the entire budget and pre-assign salaries and schedules, and then people either agree to take the jobs or not.  No-budget shooters on the other hand need to be more flexible with timing and compensation because you’ve got as much of the latter as you can squeeze out of people and very little of the former, and crew casting will drive the budget and schedule rather directly.

Lock Locations, Build Sets, Get Props

You need to finalize your locations both for the budget and schedule (getting the final budget and schedule right is the driver for much of late prepro / early production), and so that your art department can start translating the Production Designer’s vision into reality by building and buying sets and props based on the images and measurements gathered during location scouting.  You may not be able to build full sets for some locations (be it extensions and dressing for what is properly called a location, or a what is properly called  a set to be used on a soundstage) at this point, because they’re too large and/or site specific to be built in a workshop, but everything else is fair game.  You want all the props and as many of the set pieces as possible to be done before you go on-set / on-location.

Finally, you need to just stop getting ready at some point.

There is a saying in the business: no project is ever finished, it merely gets released.  (And many variations thereupon.)  Script revisions, storyboards, production design, previz and camera test tweaks need to end some time, and probably some time before you spend more on them than you should have is a good time to do that (especially if you’re observing diminishing returns in terms of making the storytelling — visual and textual — better).  You really need to stop changing these things as soon as possible so that all the rest of this stuff can get locked down — especially the schedule and budget.

Movies usually go over budget and off schedule because of ongoing changes.  Indecision, second guessing, infighting amongst power players, and so on can be the cause of these changes, but if they’re not curtailed it can mean financial (and artistic) disaster.  Some studios, like Pixar, have spent years (and huge amounts of money) figuring out how to carefully balance the need for ongoing and sometimes very late changes to make the film better with knowing what not to change, and fitting those changes into a carefully crafted whole.  Pixar has a well developed system for doing this, and a large, talented staff who have learned over many years how to pull it off.   This approach provides great results for a few studios, and is an unmitigated disaster for others.  And even for the experts, it is neither easy nor cheap.

I’m not talking about on-set inspiration taking a scene or a sequence in a new direction.  I’m talking about big structural changes.  You need to go on-set prepared so you can deal with flashes of inspiration, actually necessary changes, and a million disasters of varying sizes by having a well-laid foundation you’re building on.  If you go on-set with everything still in flux (or so recently having been finalized that you haven’t had time to internalize your own vision and decisions), you’ll get confused knowing what piece goes where, and things can easily spiral out of control. If you find yourself continually making major changes throughout late prepro / early production, maybe your film isn’t really ready for production.  And if your film isn’t actually ready for production, why is it in production in the first place?  If more executives (and producers, directors, etc.) asked themselves this question seriously (paying it lip service is easy), there would be more quality films coming in on-time and on-budget.

But not all Cinematographers lord over their Gaffer. Many rely on the Gaffer’s experience to help them achieve the look they’re going for, giving general directions rather than micromanaging the placement of every light. The best Cinematographers develop the same kind of trust relationship with their Gaffer that the best Directors do with their Cinematographers. By learning each others’ styles and how to work together, a Cinematographer and Gaffer can develop a shorthand for quickly creating the right look for every shot.

Grips tend to get even less respect than Gaffers, even though they are essential to pulling off complex shots. Dolly grips, TechnoCrane operators, and the like are critical for Directors and Cinematographers that want the most sophisticated camera moves they can get. The rigging that Grips do ensures the safety of the cast and crew who are all standing beneath potentially tons of lights and light modifiers. Rigging problems can be quite vexing, and require some very creative solutions. A smart, talented Key Grip is just as critical to a shoot as any other lead role.

For no-budget shooting, lighting and rigging can become very creative. Even on a big set that creative problem solving can be the difference between hitting the look or not, but because no-budget shooters are always running low on time and money, there may be no second chances or backup plans.

On Hitchhiker, we had to shoot long dialog sequences inside a car. The actor was rightfully worried about trying to act while actually driving, particularly with a camera rig hanging off the car. Since we had nowhere near the budget for a truck or trailer rig, even a jury-rigged one, we decided to shoot indoors and do rear projection.

Erick built the rear projection screen using PVC pipe and translucent plastic from Home Depot. One interesting thing that we didn’t even think about until I noticed a problem on-set was whether or not the translucent material was color neutral.  It wasn’t, and I wound up having to adjust the color of all of our footage in Final Cut Pro in order to compensate for the fact that the plastic caused a color shift towards green.

Because the original plan was to shoot more footage in a moving car than we ultimately did, a substantial part of the budget had been used to purchase a car rig that wound up not getting used much in its expensive configuration).  But its suction cups became the basis for a cheap setup that Erick rigged to allow the camera to move with the car (which was jittered by someone pushing on the bumper — subtely, to make it seem as if it was hitting minor road bumps).

Car Rig and Rear Projection Screen with Emma, Dani, Austin, Danielle

You can see above that the car rig involves a long straight bracket (actually, two of them) bolted to the suction cups and stuck to the car.  The camera is then mounted to the bracket with a metal L-brace, and reinforced by being strapped to the bracket by the handle (one strap holds the long, heavy homebrew 35mm lens adapter Emma built, so it doesn’t torque off).  The image below has the straps outlined in red so you can see the basic idea (assume one of the straps runs down and is hiding the bracket, which is the case in that bad photo):

Me and Erick hamming it up for the camera, next to the Car Rig and the Rim Light Rig (and Danielle, Brandon and Austin)

To keep the camera from jittering/swinging side-to-side or front-to-back, a simple counterweight and stabilization system can be added to the rig: a tripod.

The bracket also helps prevent this — if you only had straps and no L-bracket in your rig, you’d need the tripod even more. But even with the bracket, because of some of the parts not fitting together perfectly, the whole rig was a bit loose.  So the tripod also generally served to help generally maintain the camera angle even though the bracket was also doing part of that job.

Loosening the vertical lock to allow the camera to travel vertically is the trick, and the tripod does the rest in terms of helping maintain camera position, preventing swing and saving your camera if your rig fails (ours didn’t).

Car Rig with Dani, Danielle, and Austin

You may be wondering: “What is that mess at the opposite end of the rig bracket?”  Part of it is a jacket taped to the bracket with masking tape so nobody injured themselves on the bracket.  In building the bracket, we forgot to include any kid of safety cap.  Oops.  Another part of what you’re seeing is a clever and obviously no-budget lighting solution.  Here is a close-up:

Rim Light Rig on Danielle

Dani, the DP, wanted a rim light on Danielle to give her head some separation from the background.  Fair enough, but we didn’t have the most appropriate fresnels.  We had no 150s at all, and a 300 was just too bright (we had used up all our C-stands and modifiers elsewhere).  However, we did have these little Ikea accent lights that had been purchased to create a dashboard lighting effects.

They weren’t all being used, because a dimmed, diffused Kino Diva was quite adequate to get most of the particular look that was desired in the conditions at hand. Had it been a higher contrast lighting setup lighting Austin and Danielle’s faces with nothing but small, dim, focused lights could have been quite useful, but as it was, only two of the several little lights we’d purchased were being used — one taped to the windshield on Danielle’s right side, and one taped to a piece of PVC pipe beneath her to fill a shadow on her neck).

I took a piece of scrap PVC pipe, and taped it to the “safety jacket” on the bracket, creating a perpendicular support.  Then Erick and I used masking tape to attach 3 of the little Ikea lights to the pipe. Two are seen in the image above, and here is the third (outlined in red so you can see it — and with an arrow indicating where the light is actually pointing):

Me and the Rim Light Rig

We positioned the lights in 3 ways: by their position on the crossbar, by controlling the length of their cables (how low they hung), and by angling them into precise position at Dani’s request.  That was done quite simply: we ran masking tape along the cable and taped pieces of it together until it twised the cable into the necessary position.  Note the twisted tape on the middle light:

Me, Erick, the Rear Projection Screen and the Rim Light Rig

(We’re repositioning the crossbar in that photo.  It wasn’t held up by someone out of frame in the actual shoot.  That was considered, but even something very light starts to cause discomfort or even pain if you have to hold it up for a long time.)

The entire procedure took about 30–45 minutes, starting with the request for a rim light, deciding the Arri 300 would not work, telephoning someone that I know who has Arri 150s (but wasn’t home), my spotting the scrap piece of PVC, presenting the idea, and then Erick and I rigging the entire crazy solution.  It was possible because we were both luck enough to have some equipment in the kit that could possibly be made to work (the little lights) and we were willing to “think outside the box” to come up with a nonstandard solution.

I think it worked so well that I’m going to buy some of those little Ikea lights, PVC piping, and clamps (using tape was annoying) to permanently keep in my own kit.   Versatile gear, even if it’s not “proper” film gear, is a no-budget shooter’s best friend.

Shooting on location, especially for a no-budget production, can be challenging. Locations are easier and cheaper to get up and running than a soundstage. After all, they’re already set dressed. But with that convenience comes a litany of complications. Being unable to control the sound environment is a major issue, and one for a future post. There’s also the fact that when shooting in a location your production is utterly at the mercy of the owners of the location (even if you have a signed contract, if they kick you out, you’re going to lose time and perhaps have to re-shoot in a new location). For no-budget shoots there’s the added complication that often the location belongs to a friend whose friendship you’d like to maintain. You must then handle the location with the utmost care, and those kind of locations often have personal items in them which have inflated value in the eyes of the owner. Bad combination. Also, remember that “weird stuff sometimes happens” on-set: On a different shoot than Hitchhiker, someone wearing stiletto heels damaged an expensive hardwood floor. Repairs were quite expensive.

All those issues are things you need to keep in mind when working with locations, but his post is mainly about a case study in location lighting.

Lighting Locations: Watch out for that tree (or fence, or deck railing, or car, or…)

Locations are great because they’re already built and, sometimes, dressed. They can also be frustrating because they’re already built and, sometimes, dressed. When trying to light your location, you may find that there are trees, fences, parts of the building, furniture, and so on that you can’t move (or can’t easily move without risking the ire of the person who is letting you use the location). Your only remaining recourse is to light around these objects.

Sometimes, you can move part of the object (such as tying-back the branches of a tree). Other times you can quickly flag (or barndoor) your light in such a way that the shadow cast by the flag falls inoffensively relative to the frame, hiding a shadow from a location object that was distracting. Usually, however, you need to just keep moving, focusing (if you have fresnels), flagging, bouncing, and dimming until you find the right combination of light position, brightness, and modification that works for you (and the Cinematographer, if that’s not you).

Even so, you still need to run through the shot at least once and pay attention to where the shadows fall (the Cinematographer does, but if you’re the Director or Gaffer, you have to pay attention and be ready to confer with the Cinematographer and/or call-out anything you see that might be an issue). Only by going through the blocking once or twice can you really be sure that the lighting is doing what you want throughout the whole shot.

Sometimes, though, in the heat of shooting the Director and/or Actors will re-block the shot midstream, and it’s not always feasible to stop to relight (either due to schedule pressure, or because the Director doesn’t want to break the Actors’ rhythm). If that happens, the Camera Operator must tell the Cinematographer if they see something unusual through the viewfinder as they shoot, and the Gaffer must also keep an eye on what the new blocking is doing in terms of lighting. You might need to tweak the lighting as the Director gives the actors instructions for their next take based on what you just saw during the last.

Do these adjustments quickly and unobtrusively. During the take, don’t move around to assess the lighting, to avoid provoking any avoidable situations. Rather, you need a Camera Operator, Gaffer, Cinematographer, and Director who all know to work together to observe the lighting from their own vantage points and trust each other to bring any problems to the attention of the Cinematographer. The Cinematographer is then responsible for either deciding to sneak in a fix during the reset for the next take, or asking the Director to hold for an adjustment (the Gaffer and Camera Operator should never bypass the Cinematographer and go right to the Director, that can cause on-set confusion and destroy the trust relationship within the Camera and Electrical/Light department).

Even if you work together well, and have good communications and keen eyes, mistakes will sometimes still be made. Sometimes someone will assume that everyone else sees what they’re seeing and isn’t calling it out because it doesn’t bother them. Don’t assume. Always politely point out (to the appropriate person in the chain of on-set command) any issues you notice. Or, someone will see something that they think is just fine, which someone else doesn’t like at all once they see it in dailies.

On Hitchhiker, we ran into a situation with a shot where (a) if anyone noticed it from their on-set vantage point (I didn’t as I was viewing from the exact opposite angle), nobody said anything and (b) the Director likes the outcome, but the Cinematographer is less happy with it.

This is a frame from that shot:

Original Image

The vaguely knife-shaped shadow on the bottom screen-left side of the Actress’ face was not intentional (it’s probably a piece of equipment that got moved after the key light was placed, or an architectural detail that got overlooked because it wasn’t on the Actress’ face during blocking). Also, the blocking was altered enough that the lighting intended to reduce nose shadow isn’t having much effect. Since we don’t have a lot of coverage, some take of that shot is likely to get used.

It’s ultimately my fault, because I lit this sequence. So let’s see what I can do to fix it.

There are three basic paths you can take when faced with this kind of situation:

Embrace it

One extremely cost effective and morale boosting way to handle this kind of situation is to say to yourself (and your crew): I meant to do that. There’s not really any particular reason why that result has to be considered bad. The shot reads, so it’s then a matter of opinion whether or not the image is bad because something in it is unintentional.

Striving to keep shadows off faces, while it often flatters Actors, isn’t necessarily even the best shot design. Contrast gives visual interest. And there’s more to contrast than “hatchet lighting” (though that can be very effective). Check out the nose shadows (and the two slashing shadows the Actor’s arm is casting) on this shot:

Is it a bad shot (i.e. one that fails to be visually interesting and convey the Director’s intentions for the scene)? No, it works perfectly for the film it’s from. Sometimes, high contrast hard light is exactly what’s called for.

Reshoot

Before you choose to reshoot, which is relatively expensive even with a no-budget crew (in the no-budget case it may cost you more in goodwill than in money, depending on the attitude you take to your crew when you ask for the reshoot), ask yourself: Do I really hate it that much?

Reshooting is expensive. On a professional project, it costs a lot of money. On a no-budget project, it may not cost much more cash, but too much reshooting burns enthusiasm and goodwill. Avoid doing it unless it’s crucial. There was a crucial reshoot on Hitchhiker due to equipment failure causing a day’s shooting to be totally unusable, the above image is not totaly unusable, and sensibly we did not reshoot because of it.

Fix it in Post

Fixing it in post is also an option. You should never let something slide on-set because you assume you can fix it in post, but once you get into post, there is the opportunity to fix almost anything if you can afford to.

In this example, there’s not much we can do to make the two offending shadows go away. So, I decided to try to adjust things to make it seem more intentional (it already reads as possibly intentional, so there’s also the option of doing nothing mentioned previously — and given that Hitchhiker is a thriller and the shadow looks like a knife, that was my first suggestion).

I did a single-frame proof of concept so the Director and Cinematographer on Hitchhiker could have some ideas about what we could do with the shot if they decided something needed to be done. Under most circumstances, attempting to do the entire paint/roto fix on a shot shouldn’t occur until after it has been edited into the film. You only want to spend time and money on fixing frames you’re actually going to use.

Since the lower cheek/chin shadow is the more glaring, I started with that.

Option #1

1. Darkening the fill calls less attention to it.

Option #2

2. I tried adding a corresponding shadow slash at the top of the forehead. I didn’t like the direction that was going, but if I had, I’d have fixed the angle to match the angle of the bottom shadow.

Option #3

3. I tried making the darkening of the fill more subtle. It’s not a big difference from the original plate, but reducing that contrast makes it call a bit less attention to itself.

Option #4

4. I decided to try hiding the nose shadow in a hard shadow on the face. I realized I probably took it too far, but decided the general idea of darkening the whole left side of the face had promise.

Option #5

5. Trying to connect the nose and chin shadows but leave the eyes totally readable seemed an interesting idea. I have mixed feelings about the result. Mixed feelings is exactly what we’re trying to avoid. Next.

Option #6

6. A more subtle darkening of the screen-left side of the face, combined with the subtle darkening of the chin highlights, led to pretty good results.

Option #7

7. Taking it a little darker also looked pretty good. But it was starting to go too far again.

Which option is correct?

Whatever fits within your budget (embrace, reshoot, fix it in post), and looks best to you, is the right choice. As for the selection of paintfix options, while there are some above that I personally dislike (and others that aren’t shown which also have their merits and detriments), there is no one overall right choice. These sorts of decisions are a matter of preference on the part of the Director and Cinematographer / DP.

Since you probably want to know my personal choice: I’d go down the path of #6/#7 (#3 would also work, as would #0 — the original image). Some fine tuning would occur, of course. I’d likely make the neck and ear shadows and laugh-line highlight a little closer to #7 while leaving the rest more like #6, and spend some time tweaking the shadow shapes and falloff gradients.

There were options 8–12, but I realized I was noodling way too much, and creating too many options. Two of the biggest problems you can run into in post are creating too many options, and overworking the image. The former can lead to indecision in the face of a number of subtle variations that all seem “could be the one,” whereas the latter can lead you to abandon an otherwise promising path simply because you’ve failed to exercise restraint where it was called for.

When making this kind of decision, also keep in mind what the shot is about. Does the original mistake detract or distract from the intention of the shot? Is the cost of fixing the mistake worth your while, given the length, context and purpose of the shot when cut into the film? A number of great moments in cinema have started off as accidents, so before you make everything “perfect” in post ask yourself: Does this mistake look worse than what I originally intended, or better?

A big one, and the one that this post is about, is the availability of electrical power. Not only do you need to worry about where the outlets are, you also need to know how many circuits you have and what the voltage and amperage is.

For low/no-budget shooters in the United States, you’re almost always dealing with 15ampere 120volts alternating current (15A 120vac) household circuits. Occasionally, you’ll run into 20A 120vac, and less frequently you’ll run into 220vac power (usually 220 is found in homes for powering clothes dryers), and only in industrial sites are you likely to run into 440vac and other exotic power types. Unless something has gone horribly wrong (and is not up to code), an outlet that looks like what you’re familiar with in your house should be 15A or 20A 120vac. (If you don’t know how to figure out what kind of power you’ve got on your hands, and how to hook up to it, consult a professional. Electricity is dangerous.)

Since Watts = Volts x Amps

One of these 15A 120vac circuits can take 1800w (real watts, see below) of lighting (though you should really come in under that since you probably don’t really know the quality of the wiring at the location). So, if you have some Arri Fresnels for example, you could put a 1k and two 300s on one circuit, or you could really push it to the limits and put three 600s on it.

How many Amps you’ll use is Watts/Volts. So for 120vac, here are the values for common lights:

To keep your equipment especially safe, try not to go over 13A on a 15A household circuit, whenever possible. (Or 18A on a 20A household circuit.)

Whenever you’re dealing with real wattage ratings, these calculations are always true. However, some lights (particularly non-professional flourescent replacement bulbs for tungsten household fixtures) print a wattage rating on the packaging and/or bulb that is a tungsten equivalent wattge. This is because most people are unfamiliar with footcandles, lux or lumens @ X meters as measures of brightness, so they want a bulb “as bright as XXX watts.” You should make sure you either have the real wattage, or locate an amperage draw rating, for any light that’s not a professional tungsten light, HMI. (NOTES: HMIs: take up to 150% of their power draw to fire up the ballasts, so up to 1200w HMI is all you should put on one household circuit. As for Kino-Flo flourescents, they are rated at fewer amps than their model numbering might lead you to believe. The Diva 400, for example, is rated at 2A in their literature. This is because the model 400 is actually 4 55watt flourescent bulbs, for 220watts (1.83A). The Diva 400 is also cited as having the illumination equivalent of a 1kw tungsten lamp, so the 400 numbering seems to be based on just the max # of bulbs and not wattage or tungsten equivalent wattage.)

Also remember that your camera, sound equipment, work lights, etc. also draw power. You need to figure them into your load calculations if you’re putting them on the same circuits as any of your lights (which, by the way, is not recommended).

Sometimes your location has no power, or lousy power. Then you need a generator. If you’re bringing a generator, even a home / industrial / farm one you rented from a hardware store, remember to find out how many amps the circuit in the generator is (and how to set the generator to 120vac if it’s not always set to that by design). Many generators have the amperage information printed on the housing near the outlets, and either an obvious 120v/220v switch or a label saying the generator is 120v or 220v always. But if yours doesn’t have such helpful information and controls in an obvious location, consult the operator’s manual before hooking your expensive lights up to it.

Running long cables can lead to problems stemming from voltage drops. A more comprehensive understanding of that issue is perhaps for a future post, but the rules of thumb are: always use the heaviest (lowest gauge number) and highest quality wire you can afford, and try to avoid runs longer than 100 feet. If you need to get a generator really far away for sound purposes, make a trip over to a grip house and inquire about quieter generators and/or power cabling that’s rated for very long runs. However, test out a few cheap options first. I’ve recently discovered that a small, late model Honda generator placed at about 50–100 feet from the set is pretty quiet to begin with, and can be made quieter by hiding it somewhere clever (outside — definitely not in a building or vehicle).

Also, do not assume that when you find two outlets at your location it means two circuits (even outlets that seem far apart may be on one circuit). You need to actually test this. The easiest way to do so is to own a few circuit testers (they’re about $12), put them in the outlets to see which are live (a good idea to begin with), then get permission from the person in charge of the location (not your location manager, the person who let you shoot in that location to begin with) to switch off the circuit breakers one-by-one and have someone on the crew mark down which ones go out at the same time.

Lastly, remember to tape down your power cables with gaffers’ tape, and weigh down C-stands and light stands with sandbags. Keep your set as clean, safe, and well organized as possible.

Knowing enough about power management on-set to keep your cast, crew, and equipment safe is absolutely essential, even for a low/no-budget production. If you have any sense, you’ll refuse to work on any set where it isn’t the case that the person in charge of gaffing (lighting) knows this stuff.

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

The genesis of the project was this:
Around Super Tuesday 2008 my wife Anu and I observed that the tenor of the Democratic Presidential Primary race was an awful lot like the Best Animated Feature Oscar Nomination race: a plucky underdog whose supporters believed to represent the new face of contemporary society and a departure from the entrenched interests (Obama/Persepolis), and a popular establishment candidate whose supporters believed to represent a balance between something new and an overdue vindication of long-standing efforts to make the world a better place (Ratatouille/Clinton). To us, in both cases both choices were quite good, and we found the vitriol expressed by supporters on both sides was ridiculous. So we decided to write a skit in which debate about one (Animated Films) stood-in for the other (Presidential Candidates). To us (and as small group of others), this was utterly hilarious.

Here is the video:

It was fun to make, and the participants all found it amusing to watch, but it certainly has its problems. There are some lessons that can be drawn from the production, some specific to the type of project it is, some more general.

What went right?

• We got the thing finished, and released, by the morning of Super Tuesday.
• The actors did an amazing job of memorizing six pages of often fairly complicated dialog — in about two hours.
• We had fun doing it.
• If you’re into animation, politics, and dry sketch comedy, it’s reasonably funny.

Honestly, that was more than we expected to get right given the time constraints. The lesson there: set your expectations accordingly, and you can be satisfied with a project being what it is for its budget, time constraints, and time in history and be drawn into overworking a project into something it can’t be, or find yourself disappointed because it doesn’t reach standards that are unrealistic given what it is.

The thing that we got the most right was to keep it enjoyable. Anu really helped with that, because I was tired and stressed, which can lead me to get temperamental (which is something you never want to do as a Director — regardless of what some people seem to believe). She did a good job of the people management aspects of being Producer, which is the most critical aspect of managing a production. Good people management gets the best work out of your crew, builds trust, enables them to solve more problems on their own, and reduces overall stress for the Producer and Director. By helping me not take out my frustration on the crew, who were valiantly trying to make due with no time and no money to shoot six pages, Anu really “earned her stripes” as Producer.

What went wrong?

• It’s clearly a rush job.
• The dialog was too ambitious given the time constraints.
• The action was too boring to support the dialog.
• The space we shot in was too small — it was very hard to light, and we couldn’t move the camera or actors much.
• Equipment broke down. Without backup gear, we lost shooting time.
• I involved myself too directly in solving the equipment issues, wasting time better spent rehearsing the actors.
• I should have edited it rather than using one long take.
• I wore myself out by rushing through everything (which led to several of the mistakes above).

The cast and crew did a great job. Everything that went wrong was my fault as instigator of the project and Writer/Director/Co-Producer. I was so in love with my own clever writing that I didn’t consider what a mouthful I was asking my actors to memorize in basically no time at all, and I also thought that the dialog would carry the project with no substantial supporting action. Wrong. Filmmaking is a visual medium, and even in fast turn-around, guerilla sketch comedy some compelling visual element is critical. And without that visual interest in the staging, the lack of camera movement is glaring. We didn’t have any room in the space we shot in to physically move the camera (or the actors, really), so if I wasn’t going to move my actors more (already a mistake), I shouldn’t have worn myself out and left time and mental space for editing. Variety in the camera angles would have added at least some visual interest.

As for involving myself too directly in the equipment issues, I got in the way of my crew and neglected my own job (supporting the actors). Even with a very small project, one where you wear a lot of hats, you still shouldn’t take someone else’s hat off and try to wear it — even if they’re having problems (unless they’re so incompetent they can’t solve the problem in a timely manner and you must step-in — which was not the case with this project). Not only does this erode the trust relationship between Director and crew, but it distracts you from the most important business at hand: keeping the creative development of the film on-track. The crew is their to do their jobs specifically so you don’t have to.

Tiny projects like this are rarely objectively great, but you can learn a lot from them and have a good time while doing it. Making mistakes is part of the learning process, it’s far easier to learn from mistakes made on $50 mini-DV projects shot in a mailroom than on a $50million project.

Project Crew: Anu, Mach, Austin, Michael, Erick, Luigi, Fabio

One point that several Producers made at the conference is that it’s always “a hard time” to be an Indie filmmaker, and that it’s an unusually bad time merely because it’s a hard time for the whole industry, and the whole economy. Their perspective, as working Indie Producers, was that if your passion is for Independent Cinema then you have to make a go of it when the time is right for you as an individual filmmaker — because the time is never “right” for entrepreneurial filmmaking.

A perspective I found especially compelling was that the demise of Warner Independent and similar big studio “Indies” is not a death knell for Independent filmmaking, but rather a resurgence. The speaker’s point was this: your competitors with the deepest pockets just got out of the market, leaving the entire playing field to the real Independents.

Right now the big studios only want to make huge budget tentpole films, and as many of the veterans at the conference pointed out — this sort of thing has happened before. Every ten years or so, the big studios focus on tentpoles and only are dragged back into smaller films when a few Indies are both sufficiently critically and commercially successful to draw the attention of the big studios back to making “cinema rather than flicks.”

However, the prevailing attitude among both speakers and attendees who work as Indie filmmakers was that Independent filmmaking is suffering from overblown expectations stemming from too much money being spent on making small films during the recent Sundance–fed Indie film spec-market bubble.

In other words, they felt too many $1-5million films were having $8-16million (and similarly on up the scale) spent on their production. Furthermore, in a crowded media marketplace an advertising arms race is on, which makes competing for audience attention so expensive that films like $7.5million Juno rose to box office numbers upwards of $100million only atop marketing budgets upwards of $50million.

This has set Indie filmmakers’ expectations very high. “A Sundance Film” has become a trope, an anti-commercial approach as cliché as the Hollywood formula. As John states:

Yet the fact that we can say a script “feels like a Sundance movie” belies this intent. It’s shorthand for challenging, quirky, maddening and (if we’re being honest) non-commercial. We want these movies to exist. But we need to be honest about their prospects.

We do need to be honest about this. The financial expectation a filmmaker sets for his or her self when describing their story as “A Sundance Film” is Juno (approx. $140m off $7.5m) or Little Miss Sunshine (approx. $96m off $8m), not the equally excellent but quite different La Mission or Death In Love (both approx $2m budget, and both still seeking distribution). Only Indie spec market hype has taught us to assume our projects are the next Juno (and budget accordingly), not the next La Mission.

Spending $58million plus on a $4million film (or even one that’s legitimately an $8millon film) hoping to turn it into a $10omillion blockbuster by sheer force of marketing is a luxury only a huge corporation has (well, had).

You can’t afford to compete with that. Sure, it’d be nice to get picked-up by Fox Searchlight or Sony Pictures Classics, but it’s a lot easier to do so if you’ve understood your audience and convey that fact through your story, your pitch, and your budget. Even if you don’t win the Indie filmmaker lottery and score $8-16million in up-front financing for your first feature and a subsequent negative pick-up by one of the majors’ boutique shops, you can still make a great movie — maybe even one that makes enough money to let you do it a second time. Making a $2million film, or even a $250k film — or even a $50k film — isn’t a failure, it’s a huge success, even if other people are getting to make $10million films. Selling it is even better, and that’s going to much more possible if you’ve chosen your scope and budget based on an understanding of an actual audience.

Which gets to part of what John (and James Stern) are saying that ties into a point about Indie filmmaking that was also made repeatedly at Produced-By. John puts it this way:

Every filmmaker would like her movie to break out of its niche and gain wider exposure and acceptance. But Stern’s point is apt: figure out your base, and develop a marketing plan that succeeds even if it never goes beyond that. If this sounds more like planning a small business than planning a movie, that’s sort of the point.

At the Produced-By conference there was an Indie Distro panel where the panelists recommended, in light of the current attitudes of the corporations that run the big studios and exhibitors, that Producers start thinking about the business of Distribution — even becoming microdistributors themselves. John’s post briefly touches on alternate distribution (V.O.D. in particular) as a potential savior of Indie filmmaking (a topic that was much discussed at Produced-By), but in suggesting that you consider budgets, distribution and marketing during script development, John is basically suggesting that filmmakers (his audience is primarily aspiring Writers and Directors) think more like Producers.

Why should you think about parts of the process that “aren’t your job”? Because Independent filmmaking is entrepreneurship, and in any small business everyone involved needs to think about the bottom line when doing their jobs because there’s no huge corporation providing a cushion in case of failure. Most investors in truly Independent films are not in a position to throw their money away, and they want to see both a tenable budget and realistic expectations of return.

It’s pretty easy to understand the basic principle at play here: you want to spend less money on making your film than you reasonably believe, based on analysis not dreams, that you can make off of it. That’s the surest path to being able to make a second film, and a third, and a three hundred eighty seventh. Should you then get lucky and make $150million domestic gross off your $7.5million dollar film, that’s fantastic. But your $7.5 million dollar budget should be based on an audience analysis that gives good odds for $10million gross, not a reliance on winning a $150million box office lottery (in other words, don’t create unrealistic expectations in your backers).

And while Writers and Directors need to consider these things much more than perhaps they have in the past, Producers should ultimately still be responsible for thinking and acting like Producers. A good producer is responsible to both the creative team they’re a part of, and the financial team that is hoping for a return on their investment so they can work with you again. And if you don’t have the skills and drive necessary to Produce your own films, you really need to find someone to work with who is dedicated to the Producing craft.

Non-Producers still need to do what John and the others are suggesting and “keep their audience in mind from a project’s initial conception — even if that audience isn’t a typical mainstream audience.” Filmmakers need to aspire to making films that are personal, yet universal — not personal through smug inscrutability. And if your vision requires making a film with an extremely narrow appeal — budget accordingly.

And to be a good Producer you not only need to keep that audience in mind when working with the rest of the creative team to develop the voice, style, and scope of your film, but you’re also obligated to determine the realistic size of the target audience, and create budgets and marketing plans based on that.

Thinking about your audience is not anathema to great storytelling and filmmaking — or even art. By choosing to be a filmmaker and/or artist, you’ve chosen to communicate your ideas and stories to others rather than keeping them in your head, so you’ve already decided to care about speaking to an audience in terms of structure, theme, tone, visual style, and so on. It’s all about reaching an audience. And understanding the business dimensions of your audience, or developing a relationship with a Producer you trust who does, will enable you to craft projects that are designed to be successful both artistically and financially.

So to paraphrase several folks at the Produced-By conference: It’s always a hard time to be an Independent filmmaker. Are you going to do something about it, or just sit around complaining waiting for some big studio to give you a handout?