Shooting Schedule & Shot List
Published by Emil Abraham,
Shooting Schedule
A shooting schedule is a project plan of each day’s shooting for a film production. It is normally created and managed by the assistant director, who reports to the production manager managing the production schedule. Both schedules represent a timeline stating where and when production resources are used.
Script → Shot List →Shooting Schedule
When you go on a shoot, you’ll want to have a few different kinds of paper records of your ideas to guide you through the often technical and time-consuming process of getting images on tape. A storyboard is an extremely valuable tool, if you have time to make one. If you don’t make a storyboard, at the very least you need to create a shot list — a version of the script that breaks down the story into a series of shots, and describes each in simple notation of scale and subject. The shot list included here uses arrows down the right side to indicate nonconsecutive shots that can and should be filmed in continuous takes — that is, the director plans to cutaway briefly to a reaction and then return to the same image, so there’s no reason to stop the camera. The function of the shot list during the shoot is that it allows the filmmaker to quickly place the particular shot being recorded into the larger narrative context of the production.
Since it is extremely inefficient to shoot a story in the order the shots appear in the final production — if a dialogue scene cuts back and forth between two people, you’d have to keep resetting the tripod and lighting over and over, repeating all your tech labor after each little snippet — films are always shot out of sequence, organized in a way to get as many of the same kind of shot in a single setup as possible. Do all the shots from one side of scene at once; do all the shots in the same location at once, no matter if some come at the very beginning of the story and some at the very end.
This requires preplanning: the goal being to arrange the shoot so that it requires the least amount of repetitive labor — a big make-up change is more complicated than a camera set-up, so that would take priority, and so on.
The plan for exactly what gets shot in what order is called the shooting schedule. As you go through the shooting schedule, check off each shot as you complete a satisfactory take — then check it off on the shot list too. Just having a shooting schedule is not enough, because you quickly lose the sense of what’s really supposed to be happening in the shot when you look at all the notations out of sequence.
One thing that is recommended, is adding to a note about continuity — how you get will need to get into or out of a shot in editing. Indicate where you may have a Match-On-Action planned by noting ‘MOA’; make notes on where the screen direction of eye lines, exits/entrances should be at the beginning and end of shots. All of these things are very easy to forget if they’re not written down.