32 The Digital Filmmaking Handbook, 4E

Planning for Pickups

After you’re done with your principal shoot, you might find that you need to reshoot or add new scenes. These pickups are usually shot after a first rough cut has been finished. Maybe there was a lighting problem in the only good take of a key scene, or maybe you decided that the way an actor played a scene doesn’t work. Most projects schedule a day or two for pickups in advance to reduce the likelihood of cast and crew availability problems.

Scheduling for Unscripted Projects

While scheduling for a feature film can be complicated, thanks to the script, you at least know what your end product is going to be, so you can account for all of the shots that you might need to get. With a documentary project, or any form of “journalistic” project, where you’re covering a person or event with no set goal or list of particular shots or scenes, your scheduling tasks will be a little different.

They’re called documentaries for a reason; your goal when shooting one is to document your subject as thoroughly as possible so that you’ll have plenty of footage to work with once you’re back in the editing room. In general, you’ll probably shoot 20 to 30 times more footage than a scripted movie, and in some cases, this ratio may go even higher.

Obviously, if you’re covering a particular event, your scheduling chores center on the duration of that event. If it’s a complex event that involves several crews of shooters, then you’ll need to map out a shooting strategy and schedule ahead of time. Similarly, if you only have one camera rig, but it’s a very long event, then you’ll need to schedule your crew in shifts for continuous shooting.

Most of your other shooting tasks will probably involve interviews or trips to other locations to gather supporting material. Scheduling these is usually just a simple process of sorting out which interview subjects or locations are available at particular times and scheduling accordingly.

Documentaries often have the advantage of not having such a tight shooting schedule as scripted features, but they also need to be able to “run and gun” when something unexpected happens. Planning for documentaries should always include the assumption that some sort of “surprise” will happen on every day of shooting. If there aren’t any unexpected events, you might want to consider whether or not you are capturing interesting material.