Time and Deadlines

Time and deadlines within logistics

Deadlines – A deadline is the time or date that you want to have a finalised product for.For a film, whether it’s a short or feature film, this involves:

·         writing your budget – Breaking down the script can link to the budget as you can translate the breakdowns into rough idea on the budget line items. Budgets will usually be checked over and over so it won’t be completed straight away.

·         creating a crew – For your crew you need to find the perfect workers if you want a successful outcome, this crew will have to stay on set for many hours in a day and will have to put their best work into it all. These great crew members take time to find so don’t settle with the first person you find because you might find someone better later on.

·         finding locations and booking them – For locations you’re not just taking notes on the scenes in the film you need to take notes on the surrounding areas as well making sure that everything is suitable for your shooting days, you need to check accessibility, electricity supply and certain facilities such as toilets.

·         creating meeting and talks – Meetings should be held very regularly to keep everyone up to date on the changes, if there is any, and seeing if anyone can add to a contingency plan if you need them because taking other people’s opinions may help as they might know people specialised in certain areas. 

·         creating a script breakdown – The script breakdown involves documenting how many characters there are in the scenes, where the scenes are, and how many scenes there are in total.

All of the objectives listed above need to have deadlines to give you a smooth operation however most of these could be dealt with by your production manager(s). To help with all these deadlines you can create a calendar, which makes everything much easier to look at so you don’t miss or forget about anything, it also makes you able to be a lot more efficient with your time.