What does it take to get a feature in the can? What are you left with after all the effort you’ve put in? What do the numbers tell us about the film we shot?

Over the last weeks, we’ve gone over a lot of different areas of production and how you, as the director, can get the best out of every aspect.

Today we’re going to look at the results.

Let’s roll.

Cast and crew - by the numbers

Let’s start with the cast and crew. How many people does it take to make a feature film?

In our case, we had a total of 26 different crew members and 15 cast members. Were they all on set at the same time?

No.

Our crew size varied from 10 to 16 people, with most days seeing a crew of 13 or 14. That’s quite minimal for a full feature production. We usually had a three- to four-person camera team, and every other department was one person.

For cast, we had from 3 to 9 cast members on any given day. We had our main trio of Kate, Vincent, and Jordan every day, and would often have 1-3 other cast members. The last two days, we had some minor speaking roles where crew stepped in to fill the roles. Those days we had 9 cast members.

The same went for extras. We’d use crew as background actors, and for the hillbilly chase scene, we got some locals to come help for a few hours.

Keeping the cast and crew small is essential when you’re working on a micro-budget feature like this. More people add more of everything else, complicates logistics, and inflates costs. The way I like to think about it is to break down the crew into essentials only. A three- or four-person camera team might seem like a lot for such a tiny crew. But it helped us move faster and not overwhelm one person with too much responsibility.

The same idea goes for your film. If you have a prop-heavy film, it might be worth giving some extra help to your art department. If you’re doing lots of make-up and special fx make-up, getting an extra make-up artist can be crucial to making your days.

It’s all relative to your film.

One general trick I like to use is to hire multitalented people. Our production designer, Andrew, is a good example. He was in charge of all the props and set decorations, but when we were in the forest with just our actors and their personal props, he would chip in wherever we needed help.

This kind of attitude is worth its weight in gold.

When productions get bigger and you have more robust departments, there starts to be a stronger separation between who does what. Avoid that kind of departmentalization in your small production and instill the mindset of making the film together (as a team).

The Production - by the numbers

Our production was short for a feature film, but not extremely short.

You see features shot in 5 days, 2 days, even 12 hours. We shot Wild Boys over 11.5 days of production. We also had two days of pickups later on, once we knew which pieces we were missing, but we’ll talk about that some other time.

Our production got off to a rocky start when we had to postpone our principal photography because of a forest fire. We ended up shooting a day at my office, and half a day up in some mountains nearby.

Our main shoot was 10 days, and since we used the sun for most of our lighting, that dictated when we could shoot. A typical day would go from sunrise to sunset, 6-7 am to 5 pm. We had one day when we shot a night scene, and started a little later in the day and went until about 11 pm.

The day after, the midpoint of our shoot, we took an “easy day” and only shot for a few hours to give our cast and crew a bit of a breather.

This graph shows how many scenes we shot per day, but scenes can be misleading. It looks like the third day of principal photography was pretty crazy, but if we compare that to how many setups (or shots) we shot per day, you can see it was actually quite normal.

We were fairly consistent over the course of the main shoot, with 28-42 shots per day. The three days in the middle were intentionally scheduled a bit lighter to make sure we didn’t lose momentum.

Shooting for 10 days without a break is usually not advisable, especially on a longer schedule.

But we got away with it because it meant our cast and crew had to take less time away from their normal lives since we shot from weekend to weekend.

In total, we shot 323 setups, which comes out to about 28 setups per day.

When going through our numbers, I also thought it was interesting to see how few shots we would shoot for most scenes. A lot of short scenes have one or two shots, as you can see in the graph below.

It’s also easy to spot the longer, more complicated scenes. The outlier with 22 shots is our action showdown between Kate and the hillbillies, which required a lot of setups to capture the action.

On average, we shot about two takes of each shot, and the most amount of takes we did was 8.

One thing to note about takes is that we shot a lot of series. This is a take where you reset the action without cutting the camera. The result is that each take has several takes in it. It’s a great shooting strategy, especially for comedies. It allows the actors to remain in the moment and keep riffing, improvising, and trying out things.

As long as there aren’t big technical resets or props/make-up that need fixing, I find that shooting in series can be a great way to speed up your days.

The Material - by the numbers

When I put all the footage in a timeline, it totaled over 24 hours.

With a final runtime of 84 minutes, that means our shooting ratio was 17:1, meaning for every minute that ended up on the screen, we had 17 minutes of footage.

This would have been pretty standard numbers in classic Hollywood-style filmmaking. But after the transition to digital, the trend has been to shoot more and more footage. Some of the biggest blockbusters out there have a shooting ratio of 400:1, which is mind-blowing.

Having edited the film, I can say that the amount of footage we captured was barely enough. We’d usually shoot until we had one good version of a shot and then move on. In the edit, the lack of options was often a challenge. Which is why you’ll often see comedies shooting a lot of footage, because they’re letting the actors improvise while the cameras are rolling.

That wasn’t always a luxury we could afford.

The reality of shooting cheap and fast is that you have to compromise somewhere. We sacrificed options to make our schedule and get something for the entire film, rather than miss pieces.

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