Planning, budgets and takes

Your shot plan (the plan, for short) turns the approved treatment into shots, generations, assets and money before anything is built. It only divides what the treatment decided; it never changes it. This chapter has three sections: the plan itself; the money, from risk bands to the estimate; and the takes, from the generation rhythm and the retry rule to the stop rules and the take log.

Everything in the plan is internal. No part of it, its estimate or its measurements reaches a client page.

The plan

Beats, shots, timing windows, each generation's method, and the asset and version lists.

• Marking the beats: A beat is one thing the viewer must see or hear.

• One continuous shot or real cuts: For every scene with more than one beat, write both options, then choose.

• The rules for each shot: Each shot in your shot plan follows the research default, with named exceptions written where they apply.

• Timing, grouping and trimming: Plan time in whole frames, group shots of one world into one generation, and plan more generated length than the film uses.

• Choosing each generation's method: References only is the default.

• The asset list and versions: List every asset the film needs, mark what is built rather than generated, and decide every version and ratio before anything is made.

The money

What a film costs: risk bands, budgets per shot and the estimate.

• Costs and the estimate: Every generation gets a risk band, every line of the estimate two figures, and nothing spends before its stage's estimate is agreed.

The takes

The sample batch and production batches, fixing a failed take, the stop rules, drafts before finishes, and the take log.

• The generation rhythm: First one sample shot per scene, reviewed all together; then the rest of the film in production batches, where each remaining shot gets one new take in each batch.

• Fixing a failed take: Name the failure and its level, then change one thing in that layer only.

• The stop rules: The stop rules hold for every generating step: video, stills, voice and music (decided).

• Draft small, then analyse: Draft cheap, judge each kind of fault where it shows, and buy no 1080p finish blind.

• Free measurements from takes made anyway: No take is made to check a method.

• Your take log: Every attempt, kept or not, gets an entry before the next one runs.