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Have I been living under a ROCK?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Fred Potts
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Fred Potts

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A talent that was in a recent film of mine claims that a good feature films only takes a week to shoot. I told her that it takes longer then a week. She said then the problem I have is not having great cast and crew that works well with each other and if I have that it shouldn't take more then a week to shoot a feature film. So the question I have is: Have I been living under a rock not knowing you can shoot a feature film in a week?
 
I think the more based take would be you can make a feature film in a day, but you can't make every feature film in a day, a week, a month, or even several months.
 
I shot a feature this summer in 8 days-- though we owe ourselves enough pieces that we'll realistically have to add 1-2 days of pickups. Heavily conversation-based, one main location but maybe 10 total. I can't imagine going much quicker than that or filming more action.

Phil's answer is correct. But if you're wondering about "what the industry is doing," I think the shorter feature productions I hear about are still usually 15-ish days-- and no one thinks that's luxurious!

Is your talent making "good feature films" that people actually want to see? ;-)
 
Yep. I think my additional layer of context to a decent reply related to the realities of all of this is when determining the filming schedule for a project it's a balancing act between goals and compromise. Ideally if budget is having an impact on your schedule you land in a decent middle ground.

We don't use this term much in modern times, but the talk of the town a bit ago was "production value" and that referenced often what was in the frame, but also referenced what's going on in the frame and how much it took to get there.

Modern trends outside of pretty upper tier productions is sacrificing a great deal when it comes to production value and even quality to just get the baby pushed out as fast as possible.

Only shot one feature (I was the DP) in a week and we were mainly lightweight kit, lots of shoulder and steadicam, with a few interior scenes on sticks with only one biggish set piece art department-wise. Not-so-semi-ironically we had a similar schedule for a short and were able to do more with that than the resulting feature.

I was given advice a long time ago from a fairly big director that is worth keeping in your mind. You only get to make the movie once.
 
well technically you could shoot a feature in 90 minutes.
i think a better question is how long it takes to shoot a feature WELL. and maybe more importantly how long preproduction takes
 
"I really want to comment on this...but, uh, won't."

I'll help you. It's called hot clown garbage.
 
Phil Holland said:
I think the more based take would be you can make a feature film in a day, but you can't make every feature film in a day, a week, a month, or even several months.
Click to expand...

That was the quickest TED talk on film production I've ever seen.
 
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