Shooting Schedule

Overview

Filmmaking, TV, and media production is demanding work. Students should be very mindful of the impact of their decisions. Often cast and crewmembers that are participating on their sets pay the price for poor choices.

Student productions must not schedule workdays longer than 10-hours and must provide 12-hours of turnaround time.

Brent’s Rule

Fatigue can kill. The death of 35-year-old camera assistant Brent Hershman, who died in a single car accident while driving home after two, consecutive 18-hour days while working on the feature film “Pleasantville,” generated a strong push to limit professional film and television productions to a 12-hour workday by labor unions. This effort is known as “Brent’s Rule.”

Today, it is common professional practice for productions to ideally schedule for a 10-hour workday. Hours worked after the first 10, productions typically provide their crew 1.5x their hourly wage and 2x their hourly wage as overtime pay. Additionally, the sixth and seventh day of a work week also requires the payment of 2x the crew’s wages.

This acts as a financial penalty to encourage productions to limit the length of their workdays. The idea being that it is not only safer but more cost effective to schedule additional days or weeks of production than to continually work the crew on back-to-back shifts that go into heavy overtime.

As student productions primarily depend on volunteer labor, there is not the same mechanism in place to incentivize these productions into maintaining a reasonable work schedule.

Work Week

Student productions must not schedule work weeks longer than 5 consecutive days. 6-day and 7-day work weeks are not permitted.

Student producers, UPM’s, and 1st AD’s who ask or expect cast and crew members to work over a 5-day work week may be subject to disciplinary action.

Workday

Student productions must not schedule their workdays for more than 10 hours. This includes wrap time, but excludes meal periods.

There is some leeway given to help deal with some of the unexpected circumstances that come with production, but this cannot be abused. If a student production repeatedly breaks a 10-hour day, it has not been scheduled properly. Student producers and unit production managers who continually push their crews to work over a 10-hour day need to actively address their scheduling issues before faculty or staff step-in to take corrective action.

Student producers, UPM’s, and 1st AD’s who ask or expect cast and crew members to work over a 12-hour day will be subject to disciplinary action.

Turnaround Time

Student productions must provide a minimum 12-hour turn around between consecutive shooting days. That means call for the next production day cannot be less than 12 hours from the final release time of the previous day. For example, if wrap completes at 10:15pm Tuesday night then the earliest call on Wednesday morning can be is 10:15am.

Student producers, UPM’s, and 1st AD’s that do not provide a minimum 12-hour turn around on their production will be subject to disciplinary action. Additional turnaround time shall be provided for locations that are over a 30-minute drive time from the UCF main campus.

Travel Time

Student productions that choose to use locations which are more than a 1-hour drive time (one-way, roughly 50 miles) from the UCF Main Campus must provide either a carpool service and/or housing accommodations to cast and crew. Exceptions are permitted for cast and crew members who are local and have their own accommodations within 1 hour drive time to the location, or if the production day is limited to six hours or less.

Drive times of over 3 hours or more (one-way) should take place on off-days when no production is scheduled.

The driver of a carpool vehicle should be well rested and should not function as an on-set crew member. Productions should not carpool cast and crew on back-to-back days, as they should be providing accommodations for productions shooting multiple days at a distant location.

Accommodations

Productions taking place outside of the Central Florida, or the immediate surround areas (one-way drive times of 3-hours or more), should arrange housing for cast and crew.

Overnights and Splits

Typically, productions start in the early morning and end by night fall (e.g., 7am to 7pm) This type of schedule is known as “days.”

“Overnights” is when a production takes place at night, typically when most people are sleeping. Overnights are commonly scheduled from sundown to sunup (e.g., 7pm to 7am).

Student productions should avoid working overnight when possible as it is very disruptive to personal schedules and can impact a student’s ability to attend class or complete assignments. This is because it requires twice the amount of time commitment from crew and cast as it dramatically displaces sleep schedules the days before and after production.

“Spits” is when a production takes place half during daylight hours and half at night. Typically, this is done in the early afternoon until the late evening or just after midnight (e.g., 1pm until 1am).

Day for Night

There are production techniques that can be used to help cheat daytime for night. While shooting overnight might be easier to photograph, shooting day for night has less negative impact to crew and cast morale and personal schedules.

Interiors

Choose locations that have a minimal number of windows or visible sunlight. Use black plastic sheeting (aka Visqueen) to blackout windows. The strategic placement of practical lights, such as desk and table lamps, helps to sell the nighttime.

Exteriors

There are variety of special photographic processes, color grading, and lighting techniques that can help sell day for night photography. A common practice is to white balance the camera to 3200K and use the daylight to simulate a blue moonlight. Underexposing by two or more stops helps to darken the overall scene. Try to limit how much of the sky is seen by shooting under tree dapple or have having building in the background. The strategic placement of practical lights, such as exterior wall sconces or car lights, helps to sell the nighttime.