Feature Film : : Valley of the Sun

Putting together a shooting schedule is like a damn rubik's cube, you change one thing, something else gets jacked. For Valley of the Sun, the first big consideration was the hair. The protagonist gets a haircut in the first third of the film and wears it short the rest of the time. That means I either need to schedule the film around the cut or get a really nice wig (expensive). I checked into wigs and a good one runs about $2500. Then you have to consider that I'd need a good hair person to apply the wig and of course the time to do so. That could be a budget killer for us. If we don't go with a wig then we'll have to shoot in a location, move to another location and then come back later to shoot material after the haircut. To leave a location and come back later is super inefficient. I consulted with my good friend and producer Vieve Haag. She mentioned hair extensions. Brilliant. They are cheaper and don't need to be applied each day. She gave me the name of a hair shop over on fillmore that I have to check out.

So, with the hair extension option, I've removed the need to schedule according to hair. Now the priority becomes about shooting consecutive days in locations and scheduling our actors most efficiently. While I am going to cast most of my talent in Arizona, I probably fly a couple of the lead roles out from LA. That means I need to make them my scheduling priority. The SAG contract we plan to work under allows for a better week rate versus a day rate. So, I am working to pack my actors working days into weeks. If I only need my actor for 4 days of the week, it's still cheaper to hire them on a week (5 day) week versus paying them for four individual days. When I create my schedule, I would review the day out of days report and tweak the schedule to get as many week rates as possible. Sometimes it simply a matter of flipping two shoot days and I would save a grand.

Once I had the schedule ordered properly, I broke the schedule down into days. In other words, I inserted day breaks. Then I input the estimated shots (see previous post). Once I have my estimated shots in the schedule, I can count up the shots for each day and make sure the day is looking realistic. For days that I have too many shots, I need to split that day into two days.

To use a skiing analogy, during this part of the process I try to visualize the shoot much like a downhill ski racer might visualize the course... you know when they are at the top of the mountain standing with their eyes closed and skiing the course in their mind with their body mimicking the turns. This is part of the process is all about that pre-visualization. You have to be able to see that you are going to make the turn and not spin out. If you can't see it happening, realistically, then you will probably crash and die.

Download Valley of the Sun's Current Schedule: