Scheduling

Once you are ready to beging the production phase, you need to create a shooting schedule. Often times, this is done by the Director, Assistant Director, and Producer. There is an easy software program called Gorilla by Jungle Software to help you schedule. You can download a free trial version. However, if you can't afford to buy this once your free trial is up, you will have to do schedule on your own. I usually use Microsoft Excel to help me.

Like I said in a prior post, effective scheduling will save you a lot of time and a lot of money. First, you need to find out when your actors are available. Can one actor only shoot on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Do they work during the day and can only do weekends? It is very hard to schedule around people’s schedules. However, if you are not paying your actors, you must be understanding. Exit 117 was shot intermittently for 15 days over a three-month time frame. While this wasn’t the ideal situation, you have to work with whatever you can get.

After you figure out when your actors are free, you need to figure out who appears with who in each scene. If your two lead actors are in five scenes together, shoot as many of those as you can. You want to get each actor in and out. You want to schedule the minimum amount of days per actor. After you figure out which actors are in scenes together, group your days by location. You don’t want to move to 5 different locations throughout one shoot day. This will waste a lot of time.

It’s all up to you how you want to go about scheduling. This worked well for us. However, depending on your actors, locations and script you could do it entirely differently. Either way, make sure you have a solid, working schedule if you want to save yourself some dollar bills.