Speaker 1: The most expensive thing in shooting a movie is setups. All right, that's what takes the longest amount of time and usually costs the most amount of money. All right, in this session we are going to talk about budgeting. So the first part of budgeting starts with doing what we call a script breakdown and a schedule. It's hard to do a budget without a script, although you can do that, but it's better if you have a script. So basically what you're gonna do is you're gonna take your script and you're gonna break it down scene by scene into the various components of what's involved in shooting the movie. So components would be like the location, where it's set, all right? Is it day or night? How many pages is it? Are there any action items? Are there any special effects? Is there special wardrobe? Is there special makeup, hair? You need to know exactly what's involved in each scene and of course actually who's in it, like how many actors, how many extras, that type of thing. So there's a format that you can use of what a scene by scene breakdown looks like. So you go each scene and you understand sort of what the components are in each of those scenes. Then the next thing you do is you take those scene by scene breakdowns and you put them into a schedule. Because the most important thing in building a budget is to know how many days you need to shoot the movie. Because each day costs a certain amount of money. But it starts with how many days, all right? So the only way to know the number of days is to do a schedule of the shoot, all right? So basically what you do is you take each scene and you stick it into, I use a spreadsheet to do this because I'm good on Excel spreadsheets and I like to have a lot of control and flexibility. But you can do it in many of the apps that are available and the online software versions of scheduling and budgeting. And there's lots of good ones. We're gonna do it on a spreadsheet. So we're gonna put all of the scenes, each scene breakdown onto a spreadsheet and put them in the categories in the columns that are involved in each component of the scene. This spreadsheet is otherwise known as a stripboard, all right, because each line is a strip, each row, all right? And the columns, the way I do it, represent sort of the items, but the rows represent each of the scenes. In the day before computers, this used to be done manually. And it was actually done, you'd write out a whole scene and you'd put all the information and it would be on an actual strip and put them onto an actual board and shift them around. You know, you don't shoot a movie in order. So that's how it got the name a stripboard because you'd have these strips. Now what you have to do is you have to determine what makes the most sense in terms of shooting your movie. There's so many things that go into this, okay? Because scheduling a movie involves a lot of different moving parts. So in no particular order, I'm gonna tell you some of the things that I prioritize. Probably the first number one thing that I prioritize is as the producer who's doing the schedule, I sit down with the director and I ask how much time do you need to do, say the dialogue for these scenes? So let's say one of the scenes is say, I don't know, four pages of dialogue. In addition to the shooting of it, there's obviously the setting up for it and there are the retakes and all this kind of stuff. So a good director can determine sort of the speed at which they can shoot. As a producer, I want the movie basically shot as quick as possible because my priority is to save money, is to get the best quality product by spending as little money as possible. That's the goal of an independent producer. So I don't really wanna rush the director, but I also don't want them to take too much time because maybe we won't have enough money to afford that. All right, so some directors might say, I need four hours to shoot that scene. So it starts with that. The second most important thing to me is, it's probably the most important actually, putting to grouping together scenes that are shot generally in the same location because the most expensive thing in shooting a movie is setups. So if you can use the same setups over and over and over again, you're gonna save a lot of time, hence a lot of money. And I'm talking lighting setups for the most part. And moving locations, going from one location to another location, we call a unit move, is also super expensive because you have to pack up all your gear, load your trucks, move, drive, set it up elsewhere. So that costs a lot of time and energy and money. So if you can try to group together scenes that you're shooting in the same location, that's going to be very cost effective. Let's say there's an office setup and there might be three times throughout the script where you're shooting in the office. All right, it might be seen, you know, 15, 37 and 62. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna group those scenes together because we're gonna set up the lighting and everything in the office. And we're gonna say to the director, okay, you need four hours for this scene, say three hours for this scene, two hours for this scene. So that's nine hours of shooting. Can we fit that all into say one day, hopefully, and we can just shoot the office that day. So all the equipment goes there, it all gets set up, but it's super cost effective to be able to group that stuff together. Maybe even spend two days at the office. But if you leave the office, go, you know, to the house and then come back to the office, you're gonna lose four to five hours of traveling time and setup time. So the secret is to try to group scenes together that are in the same location. Sometimes that doesn't work only because certain elements aren't available. Because maybe at a certain scene you need something else, some special effects, some piece of equipment that you can't get or that you need elsewhere, that type of thing. So there's always gonna be a little bit of juggling. Basically we're looking to see where we can group stuff together and how long it takes in each scene. And once we do that, now we start to fine tune. We say, okay, we're gonna need 10 different locations and based on the time it takes to shoot, we're gonna need two days in each location. So maybe that's 20 days of shooting. Now we're gonna schedule when each of those days is. So that, the strip board is built more or less, but now we want to take, say, day one of shooting and give it an actual date. So we wanna say day one is gonna start, let's say on July 15th. Four weeks of shooting back to back with two days off. It might not be five days in a row. Maybe we go three days, then take a day off, two days and take a day off. So we'll see how that works. Because the rest of it is gonna be putting them in for the dates and the dates are gonna rely on various things. Like one would be when your actors are available. Another thing would be location availability. Sometimes, let's say the office and you're using somebody's office and they say you can only shoot there on weekends. So you have to schedule it on certain days that they allow you to schedule it. So you have to start with that and then back everything out that's easier to get to. Sometimes it's equipment availability. Like if you need a certain piece of equipment like a crane or something like that, something that you don't carry in your truck and it's not available to you and you have to book, maybe you're gonna get a certain rate or a certain availability only on a certain day. You look at all of these things in terms of the limitations of availability and that's how you determine the date of what the shoot will be. But the most important thing is to determine from the strip board how many days you need to shoot. We don't need to know which days you're actually shooting on. That's for scheduling. But for the sake of budgeting, we need to know how many days. Now we wanna build a budget. So there's two ways to budget. You can do what we call top-down budgeting where we start at the top and work our way down or you can do bottom-up budgeting where you put the number that you support at the bottom.