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A day, in the life of film and TV work... (1 Viewer)

DeathStar1

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Neil
Here's a documentary idea for anyone in the biz...

To show how different it is to work on a film, compared to a Tv show, how about following around new actors on a big project for one day, and editing it down to a 2/3 hour movie extra? They always say TV is faster paced than movies, it would be interesting to see how much faster paced..
 

MarkHastings

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Jan 27, 2003
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With 22 episodes a season, if the show is an hour, that's 20+ hours of programming, produced in the same amount of time as a movie.
 

Joseph DeMartino

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A TV crew on a "one hour" drama has to turn out about 42 minutes of usable film about every 6 working days. That's half a feature length comedy, and two thirds of a feature drama. There's no time for pick-ups and reshoots months later, and post-production is measured in weeks, not months. In TV a director will typically plan for a week, shoot for a week, oversee post for a week, then move on to his/her next project. (Shows that rely heavily on FX will either have the director back for a day to review the final edit or just have someone else finish the show. Babylon 5 sometimes got finished composited shows with all the CGI only hours before they had to be uplinked to the network.)

Yeah. TV's faster. How many times have you heard on a DVD commentary track about how a film crew was on set "X" for a week - when that set was in one scene that lasted 4 minutes of screen time in the final film and occupied 3 to 5 pages of screenplay? A film crew might do four or five camera set-ups per day on that set in that week. A TV crew would have shot an entire 43 page script, 15 or 20 set-ups covering three or four scenes per day, in that same amount of time, with everyone simultaneously doing post on last week's show and prepping for next week's. :)

Regards,

Joe
 

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