Finished my breakdown, scheduling, and budget for ?Funeral Day? (a 130 page screenplay of mine). I did this stuff for my final project in my producing class and oddly enough it was a lot of fun.

I?m sure most of you have no idea what a producer does nor do you have any idea what kind of bitch-work I?m talking about. You see to get a budget you first must have a screenplay. Then you take the screenplay and break it down. This includes going through every page and marking/keeping lists of every person, prop, location, vehical, extras needed, stunts, special make-up, and well? EVERYTHING.

After you do your breakdowns (which take hours and hours) you make the schedule. A schedule sounds easy but it isn?t. You need to deal with unions and guilds. For example, SAG (screen actors guild) has all these stupid rules. For example, actors can?t work more than 8 hours a day without overtime pay. The must be fed every six hours and must get at least a 12 hour break from the time they wrapped the night before till the start the next day. Then you have to consider how many pages you can film a day. When locations are available. Time of day. And tons of other things.

ONCE you have a schedule, (for ?Funeral Day? I scheduled a 29 day shoot using SAG rules). You then do a budget, which is stressful ?cause your spending money that you know you?ll have to find from somewhere. For the budget you pay your SAG actors by union rules and then cover all the departments, making sure there is the proper equipment and people who can use it. You also need odd things like craft services (food tables) plus meals for the entire cast and crew.

So when all was said and done I was able to budget ?Funeral Day? for a cost of $175,017 bucks. That?s shooting on HD, having SAG actors, and a full professional crew. This of course is a lot of money but in terms of movies it?s nothing for a full feature. The frustrating part for me is that I?m doing a full feature for my thesis in two years and all I an think of is ?Damn, where can I get that much money???? the good news is that ?Funeral Day? is a much more complicated script and long. So my thesis should be right around $100k at most! Ok, still a lot, but it?s manageable.

(reminder: I’ll be on campus all day tomorrow, but its the last time this semester)