26 The Digital Filmmaking Handbook, 4E

In a fictional project, the second act is usually the longest. In a corporate production, however, the third act is usually the longest, because you’ll want to spend a long time dealing with the details of the solution you’re proposing.

Corporate productions have a big wrinkle, though. Before you begin writing, you need to give thought to who you believe the audience is for your particular production. A production aimed at a management team will probably have a very different message from one aimed at a board of directors. If your audience already has a deep understanding of the problem you’re going to present, then you’ll want to make a shorter first act, and devote the time to beefing up the areas that they’ll be less familiar with. You don’t want to bore your audience with information they already have, so an understanding of who your intended audience is, what they already know, and what they need to know, is essential.

Know Your Audience

No matter what type of project you are writing, it is always invaluable to have a sense of who your desired audience is and to tailor your story to that audience.

Corporate script writing often involves several levels of approval, and this type of writing by committee can quickly become a frustrating “too many cooks in the kitchen” kind of situation. Because you don’t want to invest a lot of time writing a detailed script, only to have it ripped asunder by your boss or client, it’s often best to write your first few script passes in the form of simple treatments, or short synopses of the intended project. Treatments are easier to write, and allow you to quickly present a concept that can then be reworked and adjusted before you start writing the actual shooting script.

Scheduling

Eventually, after many rewrites, you’ll have a “finished” script. (The script won’t really be finished because you’ll make loads of changes in production and postproduction, but you’ll at least have something you can use to start shooting.) Now you’re ready to start preparing for your shoot.

The first step in taking a story from the page to the screen is to create a schedule for the production. To make a realistic shooting schedule, you’ll need to determine the resources you need for each scene, the number of script pages you’ll try to shoot each day, and the order in which you want to shoot the scenes. There are many variables involved in every production— actors, crew members, props, locations, available daylight and weather conditions, equipment rental limitations, and so on. The organization of these elements can be complicated and difficult, and variables can change at any time. In addition to managing resources, a good schedule also helps you conform to a specified budget while allowing for the creative needs of the production.

As you might have guessed, scheduling is intimately tied to budgeting. Often, the same person who creates the schedule also creates the budget. You can create a realistic schedule without a budget, but you do need to have a general idea about how much money you can afford to spend on the principal shoot, whether it’s $5,000 or $500,000. A $2,000 budget for a feature-length project will be dependent on getting most things for free—especially locations, props, and