Before coming to film school I dreamed of making feature films, web series and what not but when I started filmmaking and made several short films, I found out there is so much that can go wrong and even a 5 minutes’ short film can make you go nuts. Since making those miserable short films, I realized the importance of pre-production in a film. We have heard that you should never go on location without a script but it’s not the only thing in pre-production, there are so many other elements as well, such as, proposal, budget, legalities, call sheet, script, shot list, continuity log sheet, casting, story boarding, location scouting, equipment list and a lot more. But in this blog I would like to talk about script breakdown.
Script Breakdown is an important process that allows you to identify all the script elements needed to prepare, schedule, and budget a film production. We do script breakdown for every scene.
A script breakdown element is an object, person, or process that identified when creating a scene breakdown, such as:
- Cast / Characters
- Extras
- Props
- Set Dressing
- Costumes
- Makeup
- Vehicles
- Stunts
- Special Effects or VFX
- Sound
- Music
- Special Equipment
and we give each element a unique color.
Typically, a script breakdown is done by 1st Ad but sometimes producers also do the job. Before hopping in to start the breakdown, you must first read the script from the point of view of audience so that, you make yourself familiarize with what’s going own. In the industry, script breakdown is done in software rather than on paper. It makes managing so much data easy. But before starting the breakdown, you must look out for any formatting mistakes, because software won’t recognize a scene or element if it’s not properly formatted. A few formatting mistakes are as follow:
- Scene locations (names) should be consistent throughout the script.
- Scene headers should only have INT or EXT for categorizing the location.
- Character names should be consistent too. Software will recognize Muhammad & Mohammad as two separate characters.
- The scene number should be enabled.
There are many softwares in which you can do script writing, breakdown and overall production planning. Some of the most prominent are Final Draft ($199), Celtx (Free) and WriterDuet ($12 Monthly).
The next step would be to divide your script in 1/8s of a page. This is done to have and idea about the screen time a scene and is common to the whole industry. Softwares automatically divide a page into 1/8s.
Next thing would be to identify all the script elements. You need to color code all the elements uniquely, so that it’s easy for the producer to identify everything and make sure everything runs smoothly on shooting day. Then a color legend is used in the script breakdown sheets.
Now that you’ve understand the importance of script breakdown and know the process of doing it, but there is a little more to know. Please click on following link to learn the remaining things in this process.
Film In Detail 