Assets Assemble!

Killdeer is a short film. While the Academy defines a short film as less than 40 minutes, the functional limit for the festival circuit is generally less than 10 minutes. (I have no idea of how exhibition online, e.g., YouTube, has affected the length of short films but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had.) Given the rule of thumb of one-minute-per-page, the scripts for most short films are 10 or fewer pages. But within those boundaries any given film could be a single shot (we’re looking at you, The Studio) or a thousand shots. It depends on the story and the filmmaker.

Shooting on film imposes some limits on principal photography, such as the physical and fiscal characteristics of film stock, that shooting digitally (“shooting on bytes”?) does not. It may seem that this would be a good thing because one can shoot an unlimited amount of footage. Even if it didn’t tax the cast and crew, the more you shoot, the more you edit. As I proved the hard way on Second Story, it’s possible to have so many takes of a shot that by the time you finish reviewing the last take you forget the first take.

A filmmaker friend whom I respect generally shoots two or three takes per shot. Principal photography for Killdeer shot 11 scenes, 64 shots, and 158 takes. That averages about 6 shots per scene and 2.5 takes per shot. But that means that, using the detailed notes from my wonderful script supervisor, cinematographer, and sound editor, I had 158 video files to match with their corresponding audio files. Now that I’ve completed that task, it’s on to synchronizing the audio with the video. Ah, the glamorous life of a filmmaker!