Measure it!
The most useful advice I have ever received is “you can only manage what you measure, so measure it.” I cannot emphasize this enough, and with this essay I would like to propose a way to measure anything. So here it goes.
It may sound like a very simple idea, but it is highly effective. For measuring any entity,
Identify the unit of measure.
Visualize the entity in those units.
That’s it. It’s that simple! Let’s see an example of how I used these steps managing the vast amount of data I had for my film.
Every scene in a movie is different. Some scenes are long and last for several minutes on the screen. Some scenes are small, and last for only a few seconds.
Usually a new scene starts when the location of where the story is happening changes. It is important to understand how many scenes we are filming at a location, to get an idea on how long we want to use the location. However, knowing only the number of scenes at a location does not suffice, you need to understand how long the scenes are. You may shoot one scene at a particular location, but if that scene lasts on the screen for 5 minutes, you possibly need the location for several days. But if at another location, the scene is only for a few seconds, you can possibly shoot in half a day.
We had 18 locations in total for the film, and 190 scenes. I needed a quick way to understand how long the scenes are at each particular location. Just having that data in tabular format was not going to help. I needed to measure the length of the scenes at each location.
The Unit of Measure
I determined my unit of measure is going to be a printed page of the screenplay. I printed the entire screenplay, and literally cut the scenes by hand. If the scenes were longer than a page, I pasted the two pages together, one below the other. If the scenes were shorter, I cut them to reflect the actual length of the page. This created a bunch of papers with various lengths.
Visualization
Then, I grouped the pages by location, and arranged them on the floor in my basement, again one below the other, to create a column of pages per location. The arrangement looked like this.
This instantly gave me an idea how much of a screenplay I was dealing with for each location. One bonus thing I added on each scene is if the scene happens before dark in the script, I gave it an orange column on the left, and if the scene appears after dark, I added a black column. This created another visualization to understand how much before and after dark scenes I am going to have to film at each location.
Cool, isn’t it? A simple idea of knowing the unit of measure and visualizing it on the floor quickly summarized the entire film in front of our eyes. We could literally then walk around the film, discuss how we could effectively use the locations to achieve what we wanted.
Measure it, that is the only way you can manage what you are dealing with!
