The Lonely Work of Pre-Production

For the last few days, I've been working on some pre-production stuff... mostly sorting out the scenes, characters in those scenes, and costumes. To do that, I also went through the script and marked each page to show what day (in the movie) it is. For example, day 1 pages are marked with a circle at the top of the page, day 2 pages are marked with a triangle - and so on...

Breaking down the scenes in this manner will make the shooting process much more efficient. If we have multiple scenes in one location - even if they take place on different movie days - we should shoot them all in one big block. We shoot one scene, then the actors change costumes, and we shoot another scene. With my Scene Breakdown, we can easily see what actors need to be there, what costumes they need to be in, and what time of day it is.

Now, I need to further break-down the scenes by writing in which direction I need the actors (or action) to movie. In the story, character go to and from various locations. To help orient the audience, they always need to be going in one direction (say, right to left) when going TO the location, and in another direction (say, left to right) when coming FROM the location. Make sense?

This isn't the "fun" part of movie-making, but I enjoy it. It allows me to think logically - something I don't do very often. Unfortunately, it's a lonely job. No one really wants to help with this part. :(