A Quote by Dan Payne

The bigger budget films only shoot about a page or two a day, so there's very specific amount of time spent on detail and getting each tidbit exactly how they want it. In a movie or TV show, you shoot eight or ten pages and you aren't afforded as much time to do each scene.
Film and television are very different. On the TV show, we do seven or eight scenes a day, so time and money are of the essence, and we have zero room for creativity because you've got to do each scene in only five takes. Whereas, on a film, you have an entire day to film one scene, so you have so much time to choose how you want to fill in a scene.
There used to be a period of time when you'd shoot big studio movies where you would shoot a couple of pages a day. For a TV show, you've gotta shoot seven to nine. The schedules are much more compressed.
On 'B&B,' we shoot so fast and eight episodes a week, so we have to always be on our A-game. There's really no time to make certain adjustments. We usually shoot a scene in one take, maybe two or three only if needed.
The only real difference between shooting 'Firefly' and 'Serenity' was that on 'Serenity,' we had a lot more freedom with time. When you're shooting a television show, you usually have anywhere between six and nine pages of script to shoot a day, and only twelve hours to do it. But with 'Serenity,' we could shoot one scene all day long.
When you're working with a script and you have three pages for that day, you have to shoot that. It can become sort of like a prison, because by the time you've shot what you need to shoot, you don't really have time to think or shoot anything else.
Work at getting organized like a hobby. Set aside a certain amount of time each day (or whatever time your budget will allow). While it may indeed take a fair amount of time to establish order, once it is achieved, you will save more time than you have ever spent.
When you're working with film, you can only shoot one angle at a time, and then everything has to stop, and you re-light it and shoot everything else from the opposite side, so it's really important that you stick exactly to what's written. But with the multi-camera digital setup, you're getting both sides of the scene at the same time, so it gives you that freedom to go off-book.
I love good TV shows, but it's not what I do. I kind of sculpt my films as I go along. And TV is all about writing, so you just shoot, shoot, shoot what's written.
You can’t take everything on. That’s why when people ask how does this film fit into my oeuvre. I say 'I don’t know. I don’t think in those terms’. If I did, I might become incapacitated by fear . . . How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time. How do you shoot a 150-day movie? You shoot it one day at a time.
You do need to edit yourself as you shoot because you have fewer options in a smaller movie. In other words, when I'm shooting a big movie, and I got an 85 day shooting schedule or more, then I'm saying I have enough time to shoot option A and B and C and D for every scene.
The job is exactly the same, it just goes on for longer on TV. Most feature films are 35-40 shooting days. This has 10 parts, with different directors for each block. We shoot with two, sometimes three cameras.
I get very close to people when I'm shooting them. We would go and shoot a scene with Lucy, and I would spend the whole time telling her about Rob. Then I would go shoot a scene with Rob and tell him all about Lucy. Eventually they wanted to know each other. These are two people who would never have overlapped in any other way or context. We brought to the garden at Rob's office and just sat and watched what unfolded. I remember weeping behind the camera, because I was so moved by the way they connected.
How do you shoot a 150-day movie? You shoot it one day at a time.
Usually, I have in mind what I want to do. I shoot pretty economically, so I'm not shooting tons of stuff that I could change, all that much. I'll cut something or add a little something back, but not too much. This is maybe the producer part of me, but I'm always worried about the budget, so I shoot what I know I need to shoot for the film.
Every day, there's that tension and the pressure. Each scene that you shoot is like getting to that next step, but there's still that mountain to climb. So it's not like one day is harder or one scene is harder. They are all equally challenging.
When you shoot an independent movie you have a very limited amount of time, and you don't want to be that actor, when a poor director is trying to get through a movie, that you're asking at every second to discuss performance.
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