Rewrites and the 10 Minute Rule

I'll be editing a rough cut of our next episode today. I say "rough" because not every scene has been filmed yet, so any estimation of time is an educated guess at this point.

But that's exactly what I'm looking for.

The script for this episode clocked in at 17 pages, which translates (again, roughly) to 12 or 13 minutes. (In theory, a properly-formatted screenplay page should equal a minute of screen time; our scripts always run faster.)

But we've had to reschedule a few shoots, and now a couple scenes will need to be rewritten / replaced to accommodate existing timeframes. That's fine -- but I need to know how much time I have left to play with.

So I'll drop all filmed scenes into a timeline, find a useable take of each one -- straight through, from beginning to end, no edits -- and time that footage out. Subtract from 10:00, which is our maximum episode length, and voila: I'll know exactly how much time I have left to fiddle with.

(The converse of this approach would be filming everything in the script and then some, as we usually do, and then trying to decide what scenes will live or die in the editing process. Not as fun, and invariably leads to the "Hey, whatever happened to that scene?" questions...)