Resource Guide: Pre-Production
I’ll tell you a secret: movies are made in pre-production. There are a million things that happen in pre-production. If those things aren’t done, or if they are done poorly, there’s no amount of beautiful footage or post-production trickery that can save the film. Let me just list a few of those pre-production things to illustrate my point:
The Budget. It’s impossible to make a film with no money at all. Some people claim they’ve done it. They’re lying. If you don’t budget your film, you don’t know how much money you’ll have to beg, borrow, or (please don’t) steal to fund it. If you budget incorrectly, you may run out of funds halfway through filming, and that would be a major bummer. But you can’t possibly create a budget until you’ve created…
The Schedule. Why? Because until you create the schedule. you won’t know how many days the shoot will be, so you won’t know how many days you’ll have to pay which cast and crew. And let’s not forget about equipment rentals, location fees, prop rentals, accommodations, and anything else that will need to be considered for both scheduling and budgeting. But you can’t possibly know what props you’ll need to rent or how many locations you’ll need until you’ve done your…
Script Breakdown. The old school way of breaking down a script was with a printed script, a handful of highlighters, and a pile of blank breakdown sheets. Nowadays, you can use software to tag elements like props, cast, crew, locations, wardrobe, and other stuff in the script and dump that data straight into scheduling software, which will in turn talk to the budgeting software. It’s still a heck of a lot of work, though. And if you get on set and realize someone forgot to tag/highlight a key prop when they broke down the script and now you’re paying cast and crew to stand around while a PA runs to the nearest prop house with the mad hope they’ll find the right prop for the right price so you can shoot this scene because this is the only day you have this location and that actor and the jib rental… yikes. Don’t underestimate the importance of the script breakdown.
These are just broad sweeps of the enormous amount of work that goes into pre-production — all so the production can run smoothly, on time, and on budget. The devil, as they say, is in the details. There are a few resources that really dig into those details and help you understand the scope of work you’re undertaking in pre-production. Here are three I’ve read and referenced over and over again (especially the first one):
Now, it’s one thing to read about script breakdowns, shoot schedules, and film budgets. You can learn an awful lot that way, to be sure. But the only way to really learn how to do this stuff… is to do it. Practice it. Get out your highlighters and break down a script by hand. And if you’re feeling really ambitious, use actual strips of colored paper and create a stripboard by hand to help you nail down a hypothetical schedule. And then create a budget by hand using Excel or Google Sheets. Even though software exists to streamline and connect all these steps, doing them by hand will give you a deeper understanding and appreciation of the entire process.
Of course, in order to break down, schedule, and budget a script, you need… a script! That’s where I come in. If you want to get your hands dirty with a real feature script, I’ve got two you can choose from.
Have fun practicing!
If you teach film and would like to buy my screenplays in bulk to use in your classroom, visit my Super Secret Store and get 40% off the retail price on orders over $100.