From the SoCal Film Group Mailbag - Call Times

"I have questions about shooting days. How long do you normally expect the crew to hang around for? I saw a post on WP about having a 5.am start. I assume this is unusual and has to be negotiated. I'm just wondering how long it's reasonable to expect people to work on their weekends. Also there are travel issues. Do people end up having to cross from one side of the city to the other to get to shoots or do you try to shoot centrally?"

Our typical shooting day is 8-10 hours, but we've gone as long as 14 hours when necessary. There's a trade-off involved -- you don't want to have long grueling days, but you also want to shoot the whole project in as few days as possible.

A lot of the crew's attitude about the length of a shooting day depends on hard-to-quantify factors, like:

-- how good the script is (and by extrapolation how good the crew thinks the short is going to be),

-- how hospitable the set is (comfortable temperature, places to sit when not working, good food, easily-available restrooms, etc.),

-- how fun it is to be there (which is largely a factor of the director's and 1st AD's attitudes on set, while also being influenced by the demeanors of the actors (luckily, we haven't had to deal with a lot of divas)).

But, above all else, you have to schedule enough time to get the job done. If a director tries to shorten the day just because he's worried he'll make the crew upset, he'll end up being harried and abrupt all day. Not only will this create a less-hospitable set, it will probably adversely impact the quality of the movie itself, which should be the first priority.

We sometimes schedule extra time into a day, just so the cross-trainers will have the freedom to receive in-depth instruction on the work they're doing. I've talked about the balancing act that the group does between being a film school and a production company - the amount of setups you try to fit into a day is one of those decisions that will be strongly influenced depending on if you want to staff your crew with people who want to learn new things, or if you want to crew up with the experienced people and bust out as many setups as possible. That's a decision we leave up to the ExecProd of each given project.

Our members are spread all over the place, with some of us living in the San Fernando Valley, some living in the Hollywood area, and some living over an hour away to the south (Orange County). With that being the state of things, we've all pretty much accepted the fact that we have to drive a while to get to almost any location. When we shot "Steve and Danny Fuck Up" and "Dust Devil" in desert locations, we had to drive a couple of hours each way. The crew gave the directors and ExecProds plenty of grief for that (we still say "EXT. DESERT - DAY" as shorthand for "That is an astoundingly bad idea"), but they still showed up every day and did their jobs to the best of their abilities. Having an appropriate location for your movie is more important than the commute time of your crew - and the crew understands that.

A typical call time will be 8:00 AM for the crew, 9:00 for the cast. Sometimes we'll start at 7:00 AM, with only a little bitching from the crew. If an ExecProd wants to start before 7:00, he'd better have a damn good reason. This is especially true if the location is far away - one of our members who lives in Huntington Beach (which is more than an hour's drive south of Los Angeles) regularly has to wake up at 4:00 AM to get to a set on time.

Obviously, there are always going to be individual interpersonal issues when dealing with a volunteer organization. This issue goes back to the "mutual obligation" basis on which the group operates - if I'm running a shoot that requires the crew to arrive very early and leave very late, I'll make doubly sure that they eat well and have a good time ... and I'll volunteer to help with every project they initiate for a very long time.