Why do movies take months to film, leading to odd continuity errors?

Cafe Society
1

I’m completely ignorant to the movie-making process, but my general understanding is that your typical motion picture takes 6 - 9 months to film (excluding the block-block-busters, and any Kubrick film ever made, which obviously take longer).

I’ve heard terms like “blocking”, “lighting”, “stand-ins”, etc., but it makes me wonder - when you see 30 seconds of film on the screen - is it normal that that quick interaction took a day or two to shoot?

I just sat through (on Encore) St. Elmo’s Fire again, and - as usual - revisited the Wikipedia / IMDb pages afterwards. I saw in the goofs, this one:

Continuity: When Felicia walks into the bar at the Halloween party, her bow is on the right side of her head. Camera cuts to Alec, then back to Felicia, and her bow is suddenly on the left side of her head.

How does stuff like this happen? I understand that we can ignore goofs like “Felicia holds her glass with her left hand, camera cuts to Alec, then back to Felicia, and she’s holding her glass in her right hand”.

Movements like that could be instantaneous, but how does something like “a bow switches sides of the girl’s head” take place? Do they film one 10-second sequence, then everyone breaks for lunch, Felicia takes a shower in her trailer, then comes back later that day to film the 10-second response?

Any insight from anyone involved in “the business” would be, to me, a completely fascinating read. And if this has been discussed before on the Dope, then please link me to the relevant thread(s).

Thanks -

2

I haven’t been on movie sets, but I have been on TV series sets, which take a week of hard work to film one 22 minute episode.
The wonder if it is that there aren’t more problems. The two scenes you mentioned might have been done before and after lunch, say, hours apart. Any scene with lots of people is going to take a long time to set up, since the extras have to be controlled. With single camera shots the scene focusing on Felicia and the cut to Alec would probably need new lighting, and might be some time apart. I know of a scene where a character walked out of a school gym into a hallway. The shot in the gym and the hallway, right next to each other, were actually shot on two different days in two different schools.
Dressing rooms are so important to actors because they spend most of their time there, while the technical people set up the shot. A show designed for television which used to be for a smaller screen, is going to take a lot less time to set up than a movie meant for a large screen, so I can buy the length of time. Some are shorter, some are longer. Trickier scenes take even longer. I saw one gag where a stream of cream corn was sprayed on Adam West. It took all day to set up, and the 30 second sequence took an hour to film. It didn’t even work well. For TV, they kind of fixed it in editing, a movie would have done it over, which would have taken another day.

And of course if you shoot on location you have to wait for the sun to be right, for the weather, and all sorts of other things.

3

Films are filmed in an order that it makes sense from a scheduling and financial perspective. Scenes in one location may be filmed all together even if they occur at different points in the movie chronologically. Some actors may only be available for a narrow window, so all of their filming is scheduled in one block. (Fred MacMurray in My Three Sons was notorious for this in later seasons; he would actually come in and film an entire season of his scenes in about three weeks, which often required rewriting of episodes around the existing dialogue.) Also, many scenes are shot over and over again, or may only be able to be shot at a very certain time of day to get the right angle of sun and shadows, necessitating that a scene be shot over many days. Scenes may be edited together from multiple takes. The famous conversation over coffee scene between Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino at Kate Mantellini’s oin Heat was done in almost twenty takes using a two camera setup, as director Michael Mann wanted the conversation to flow in one unbroken take, but normally editors will merge different takes together in a seamless flow of dialogue, which is often looped (recorded in post-production) by the off-screen party. Also, actors are often brought back after the end of principle filming for retakes if the review board or test audiences indicate that additional information is needed to understand the action, so a single scene may have actually been filmed across a period of months.

A good rule of thumb when considering how long a movie took to film is that one to two minutes of screen time is equivalent to a day of actual shooting time. (On a good shooting day, the dailies may include five minutes of usable footage; on a crappy one there may not be a single frame.) This is why “B unit” teams are used for shooting incidental or background scenes in most major films. Some directors are especially efficient about shooting by doing elaborate planning, storyboarding, and rehersals before beginning shooting; the Coen Brothers and Barry Levinson are particularly noted for this, as they often work on pictures with modest budgets but high profile actors like George Clooney and Dustin Hoffman, who are essentially working at a vastly reduced fee scale and can devote only a limited amount of time to filming.

Stranger

4

See, this is the sort of thing that just blows my mind. Thank you (and Voyager) for your insights. Kind of makes me appreciate even more, the two longest one-shot-takes that come to my mind (Henry Hill walking Karen through the kitchen of the nightclub in Goodfellas, as well as the opening 3-minute scene to Boogie Nights).

5

Just for some trivia, the person in charge of catching these things is the Script Supervisor.

6

To elaborate on what Stranger said, to economize you shoot all the footage from one POV of the camera at once. This is so you’re not moving the camera, re-setting the scene, and re-placing the lights over and over again. So the counter-shot often takes place long after (or long before).

However, you need to realize that this kind of thing is specifically the script supervisor’s job responsibility. He or she is supposed to be aware of these things, during both pre- and post-production. And sometimes he or she has an assistant to focus on continuity only. Those little errors you mention are definitely not unnoticed. They’re just not worth the expense of correcting, if they don’t really detract from the over-all cut–and they provide people like you with something to talk about. :slight_smile:

7

I thought it was the Continuity Editor? Or is that just a job assignment the Script Supervisor person also takes care of?

8

To be fair, sometimes shots are reversed to better match the flow of the rest of a scene, so it’s not necessarily the result of someone sleeping on the job.

9

I believe the continuity editor is the script supervisor’s assistant (if he/she needs one).

10

I’m not sure I’d agree that a movie generally takes 6-9 months. I mean, sure, occasionally a shoot will take that long, but I think 2-3 months is more typical for a shoot.

11

I work in production, mostly features, though also in episodic television on occasion. I’ve never heard of or worked with a “continuity editor”; the script supervisor is certainly responsible for much of the continuity, though other people will also have their own areas of concern: a propmaster will be monitoring the amount of liquid in a glass that is being used; that bow that was mentioned from St Elmo’s Fire would be the responsibility of the key wardrobe assistant; the background activity would be the second assistant director (assisted by the key set p.a.).
Most of the movies that I’ve worked on take 2 to 3 months, though I did work on one blockbuster that took over 4. An hour long episodic will usually take 8 days to shoot.

12

If you’ve ever watched them shoot a film, you’ll notice that they spend far more time setting things up and preparing for the shot then they do actually shooting. I’ve seen them spend over an hour preparing a fifteen second scene that didn’t even make it into the final film.

13

Who suggested that principle filming would take 6-9 months? That would be very unusual; only typical for films where an actor has to undergo a significant transformation, such as DeNiro’s change from well-tuned boxer to beer belly slob in Raging Bull, or Tom Hanks going from fatted yuppie to gaunt survivor in Castaway; and in such situations, the filming is broken into blocks. However, reshoots may occur months (or in a few cases where the movie is delayed, a year or more), with shots blended together into a single scene. Over that span of time, an actor may have gotten a tan, lost weight, cut his hair, et cetera. Of course effort is made to make the actor look as they did in the original shoot with makeup and wigs, but it isn’t always perfect.

Stranger

14

I remember watching commentry for the pirates of the carribian (the first one) and the actors mentioned that parts of a certain secene were each filmed thousands of miles and months apart, and they kept switching, Kiera Knightly had in the meantime lost her tan and the makeup did not agree with her so they played a trick with the lighting.

15

The OP did. And yes, you and Sarabellum1976 are correct; a film taking that long to shoot is very unusual.

16

yeah, in Anamorphic’s “defense”, I was the one who thought that movies take that long to make. I appreciate everyone that has contributed to this thread - this has been quite an interesting perspective from people who know much more about this field than I do.

17

The whole process can take that long (for a film to be screen, but the shooting itself is usually shorter.

18

You also have the contrast between location shooting and studio shooting. Charlton Heston tells a story in one of his books (that I’m too lazy to go look up right this minute) of an actor charging through a door (on location) and coming through the door (in the studio). In the meantime, the actor had suffered a heart attack and dropped 40 lbs. In the finished cut, it’s the quickest weight loss plan ever put on film! :smiley:

19

What about serial television?

I think I remember the season 2 finale of Deadwood took 30 days to shoot, according to the DVD commentary. That was the episode with the wedding, so it was a big honking deal with tons of extras and dancers, musicians, etc.

20

Yeah, television schedule is much tighter than features. To give an example, a friend had a pretty big role on a recent episode of Bones. Looking at her Facebook, she shot her episode the final week of March, and it aired the first week of May. So about a 30 or so day turnaround. And that’s not just filming, but also editing and the rest of post-production. That’s quick.

Something like Deadwood is probably much more of a complicated shoot, so I wouldn’t be too surprised if it took a bit longer to film.