How NOT to Film an Episode

Once upon a time, we were only supposed to have one New Year's Eve episode. We intended to cross-cut three or four separate stories and weave a tight, interrelated narrative to usher in the new year.

Then Dex went missing.

Not in the back-of-the-milk-carton sense, but the "oh, didn't I tell you I was going to Philadelphia for the holidays?" sense.

So, realizing there was physically no way to film the conclusion of the Dex / Liz storyline in time for Episode 15, we (and by "we" I mean "I") decided to turn the episode into a 2-parter. Looking back, there would have been no way to tell the complete story as well as possible in a mere ten minutes, so 2 episodes worked out much beter for us. But it's easy to consider yourself blessed when all you've done is survive an easily-avoidable accident.

So, for those of you considering filming things in advance, here are a few tips to help you keep your lid on tight:

5 Tips for Saving Time (and Your Sanity) While Making Web Video

1. Know Everyone's Schedule - Especially During the Holidays

Do you think you know who's going home and who's staying put? Call or email to make sure. Banking on the fact that you can pull off that pivotal shot "anytime next week" is an invitation for on-the-fly rewrites.

2. Schedule an Extra Hour Per Shoot

When Dex (really Kevin Koch) returned from his holiday vacation, he also returned to work at a local hotel restaurant with flexible scheduling policies. Considering he'd been getting cut early all week long, he reasoned that scheduling our shoot for Friday night -- when he was scheduled to be out by 10 at the latest -- would give us ample time to film.

As irony would have it, Friday was the night Kevin wound up staying until 10:36 PM, just in time to catch a bus to the shoot that dropped him off at 11:06. Considering I needed to pick someone else up at 11:30, that gave us a window of -20 minutes to get the shot. Long story short: someone wound up sitting on a bench for an hour waiting for me to pick her up while we finished the shot on the only night both actors were free.

Long story shorter: If you think it'll take an hour, give yourself two.

3. Fewer Edits Means Faster Editing

If you watch Episode 16, you'll notice the Leo and Dierdre sequences are planted firmly around one setup: a loveseat. This isn't because I didn't think multiple setups would help tell the story better -- in fact, we used multiple setups in their first scene. It's because I realized continuous shots would cut my editing time down severely, so we kept the action in the latter scenes to a minimum in order to allow as much of the story to be told in one long shot as possible.

When editing, those long shots saved me at least half an hour apiece in total cutting time. Conversely, the Todd / Rich conversation, which might seem like the easiest thing to film and edit, was actually the most time-consuming because we only have one camera on STBD so every setup -- including each side of a conversation -- must be filmed separately. Since Matt Pavlosky and Erik Schark were improvising most of their dialogue -- again, a fault of the original scene we'd planned falling through due to a scheduling hiccup -- that forced me to find the threads of dialogue that actually connected from take to take, which wound up being a plethora of possibilities.

Limited angles = limited possibilities, and while the storytelling is always my first priority, not going crazy while editing at 4 AM certainly helps.

4. Edit the Scripted Scenes First

If you're sticking to a target time -- for STBD, 10 minutes per episode -- you need to know which portions of each episode are static in time and which are flexible.

For example, I know in advance that every episode will have a "Previously on STBD" recap (30 seconds), an intro scene (30-60 seconds), a title sequence (30 seconds) and closing credits / extra footage (30-60 seconds). That leaves 7-8 minutes of new "story" per episode, on average (some have less, some have more).

If a scene has been scripted and the actors don't ad-lib or improvise too much, the finished edit will usually come in just under the estimated page time (which is expected to be 1 minute per printed page, as per Hollywood standards). Edit those scenes first, because that's screen time you can't easily add to or subtract from. Once those scenes are in place on your timeline, along with the standard elements like titles and credits, you'll know how much time you can actually allot to the improvised scenes (if you have any -- we almost always do), and that will help you make the hard decisions of what to keep and what to cut.

Or, put another way, you don't want to spend 2 hours editing a scene only to discover that it needs to be chopped in half to meet your time limit.

5. Let the Episode Tell Its Own Story

When I first drew up the plot and order of sequences for Episode 16, I devoted most of the page time to the Dex and Liz story. On paper, it seemed the most interesting, and their getting-to-know-you banter was meant to include numerous crafty insights and references to plot points past and future. I figured the Todd and Dierdre scenes would each take up another quarter of the story.

When it actually came time to film the scenes, we had to junk the 5 page script I'd written for Liz and Dex because we literally had no time to rehearse. Instead, they improvised the entire sequence from beginning to end, and I was left to use what I felt helped tell their story AND intercut well with the other sequences. This meant reducing their screentime significantly AND changing the pacing and order of the episode.

Meanwhile, the Todd and Rich scenes wound up including a lot more information than I orginally intended because of the way the actors improvised around the necessary plot points. Thus, that sequence comes in with more screen time than the scenes I felt were the "heart" of the story -- and yet, the Dex / Liz and Leo / Dierdre sections still feel like the center of the episode, despite the fact that they appear in a completely different order than they were supposed to.

Now, let's see if I can learn from my own advice for next week...