First an excuse; I’m a man that is constantly in a fantasy land. By that I mean I make up shit in my head. Sometimes I write it down and share it with other folk, a lot of the time I don’t. My point being that I sometimes have a tenuous grasp of reality.

And the reality of an ultra-low budget feature film production is that there will never be enough time.

I think the average goal for our shooting schedule was to film about 12 pages of the screenplay a day. For those of you who know production you know that’s pretty ludicrous. For those of you who don’t know, a normal film aims for 3 to 4 pages a day, sometimes less.

The paramount reason for the insanity was my ‘day job’ schedule. I had a week window to try and get the bulk of the thing shot. Filming was blocked into three stages. There was the ‘5 Day shoot’, in which I wanted to get nearly every scene that involved more than the 2 main actors shot. Then there was a pair of planned weekend shoots, where we’d bring back the two main actors and a smaller crew. And then there was ‘The Town Scene’ which was to be a one day trip to a distant location to pick up, well, the town scene.

Two things screwed up my plan. One is that I lost access to an important set about a week before filming. The second, and much larger issue, is that it was a REALLY dumb plan to begin with. There is a paradox here in that it seemed wholly necessary to create such an insane schedule.

We were shooting for a specific time of year, dead of winter, and thus couldn’t stretch out the filming over weeks and weeks. Plus the in story time is only a matter of a few days and we couldn’t trust the weather to be consistent if we shot from say late December to April every other weekend. Also no one, including me, could commit to every weekend or every other weekend for a few months. And we couldn’t afford to go back to the rental house 6 or 7 times to get the lights and gear we needed to do it properly (we got a deal on the week long rental rather than paying for 2 days a number of times). The ‘5 Day’ shoot made the most sense for the scope we were working on.

Now then, everyone knew we were going to have long days, but nearly all those days stretched way too long. And while there were plenty of rough moments stemming from those 16 hour days, there were also bonding moments at 3 or 4 in the morning.

Did we manage 12 pages a day? NOPE! I think we did pull it off on one day. And so the next logical question is how did we get the whole script filmed then? Simple we added filming days. I mentioned loosing access to a set, well since we couldn’t spend the time there we moved stuff around and spread out the rest of the ‘5 Day’ schedule to fill up the time that would have been spent at that location. Then added 2 filming days a couple months later and brought back the whole cast to pick up the scenes we couldn’t shoot during the ‘5 Day’. That couple months gave us time to essentially build the required set from scratch.

All in all the planned 9 or 10 day shoot turned into 14 days. Should it have been 14 to begin with? No, it should have been 25 days, but we couldn’t afford that. We couldn’t afford it both in terms of time or money. I had the time off for the ‘5 Day’ and I ended up using most of 2017’s vacation time up to take off my paycheck job for the added days. Plus I couldn’t ask anyone else to sacrifice that much time. And as it was the cost of the extra shooting days ate up all our reserve funds and then some.

In hindsight, was the schedule crazy? Hell yes. Was it necessary? Even now that its done I can’t look back and figure another way to do it without vast sums of money, so yes with what we had it was necessary. Would I willingly try and shoot something in that way again? Hell no. I’d love to make another film, but I’d never plan it with less than 20 days and I don’t want to do it again in a situation where I have to work a shift at the factory on Friday, film Saturday through Tuesday and then be back at the factory on Wednesday.

Luckily for me no one quit after being on set for 15 hours, otherwise this post might be about how we didn’t get the whole script shot.