Short Film Production: A Breakdown of the Short Film Production Process

By Kevin Waczek

After completing the pre-production process, you are ready to create your short film.  Pre-production is important to creating a strong foundation for your film. If you haven’t gone through the pre-production process, click here! Now, let’s move on to the fun part. In this blog post I will be breaking down the short film creative process, checklist, and schedule. Also, I have a free shot list download to keep your production organized! Just fill out the form below!

CREATIVITY VS. THE CLOCK

Being in production is like playing tug of war with the creatives on set (director, cinematographer, writer) and the clocks on set (producers and assistant director). One group wants to find new ways to tell the story, while the other has to remind the crew that time is money and the production needs to move onto the next shot. One side isn’t always right or wrong, but a balance is necessary to create the most productive set and the most enjoyable film.

MADHOUSE

Production has begun. You have to coordinate actors, crew, thousands of dollars of equipment, too many shots, and don’t have enough time to complete everything.  What makes production complicated are all of the additional factors that have nothing to do with the motion picture. Late lunch, malfunctioning equipment, or missing actors can get you behind schedule and make your set a circus! Let’s go over the short film production checklist to make sure your production runs smoothly.

The production checklist is better described as the production problem solving checklist. A great thing about production is all of your creative work is complete by this point in the film. What? Yes, all of your creative work is done. This is true because your creative design and ambitions are supposed to be fully fleshed out during the pre-production process. Production is the act of executing, not creating. This doesn’t mean you can’t add or subtract creative elements on set, it just emphasizes that if you wait until production to make important creative decisions your movie will likely be an inefficient mess!

Putting filmmaking aside, many people overlook the most common problems that set back films. The main problems are scheduling, equipment, and moral. What if your actors aren’t free all day? What if your locations aren’t accessible in the morning? Going down our problem solving checklist, we need to reorganize the shot list to accommodate both problems to make the shoot work.

Always have a backup plan. Equipment fails constantly. It doesn’t matter whether its a stellar camera or a reliable microphone, equipment has a tendency to fail when it is needed most. Well-organized films have a backup plan for nearly everything! What if the camera fails? We have a back up. What if it rains during our outdoor shoot? We are prepared. The solution doesn’t always have to be a direct fix to the initial problem like replacing a broken camera. Using my raining during an exterior shoot example, the solution could be changing the shot list to complete indoor scenes first and switching the production schedule to film outside another day. I know that most of you are shooting low budget films and do not have the resources to have backup equipment. What you have is what you have. But we need to have the ability to problem solve and resolve difficult issues so productivity is not affected.

Being on set has a militaristic hierarchical structure, and making a movie is like fighting in a war. One thing essential to success in both of these areas is moral.  What attributes to a positive or negative moral? Working conditions, working environment, and last but not least food. Let’s start with the most obvious. If the working conditions are poor, you can count on the crew being unhappy about being there. There is nothing more bitter than a wet and cold crew member. I differentiate working environment not merely by physical environment, but also by the atmosphere created by other crew members, most importantly the higher ups such as the producers, director, and cinematographer. Have you ever been on a set where crew members are nasty, entitled, or bitter toward one another? If you have, you understand that it is not a pleasant environment. Lastly, craft services is extremely important on a film set. Think of food like an investment: if you put the effort (and money) in, you will be rewarded by a content crew. Therefore, if you stock up on garbage and junk food, you can expect a poor performance. Most importantly, quality food will make a lasting impression on your crew of your professionalism and your project.  

OUT OF ORDER

99.9% of movies are filmed out of order. Scenes are cherry picked and placed back to back in the shooting schedule from completely different parts of the movie. Reading the shooting script straight through wouldn’t make any sense. It would feel like Pulp Fiction on steroids! Films are shot out of order because it saves time and money. If a character stumbles in and out of a bar during the duration of a film you can bet money that those bar scenes were shot one after another no matter how big the time gaps where in between them in the final film. When you start to create your own shooting schedule, you have to breakdown each scene to decide the most efficient way of shooting your film. Your shooting schedule should look nothing like your narrative script. Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all shooting schedule. It changes for every film, but the goal is the same for each: efficiency.