So, if every crazy, sexy, cool thing that happens during production on a film set, for every car that you get to blow up, for every bear that will fair against the rest, so there had been hours and hours and hours of extraordinarily boring grudge over that and then in the office somewhere saying the whole thing up. I’m not going to lie to you and saying the pre-production paperwork is sexy or even interesting in any way but I can guarantee you this, if you make three short movies in your life, you’ll skip the paperwork once and you will never skip it again because when you skip the paperwork, you’re not just shooting yourself in the foot, your shooting yourself in the foot with the 50 caliber armor piercing sniper rifle, cutting your foot off, setting your foot on fire and dropping your foot into Grand Canyon.

So pay attention. Now, there's a bunch of program that has been built to automate this process on the computer but a like a lot of things in film it never hurts to understand how it was done in the olden days on the papers. So the first thing that you do when you get your script and we have our script here and it’s ten pages long. It’s written in standard screen play format so that we know that each page will end up being about a minute of screen time and all it’s said and done.

The first we need to do if it’s not is go through and number the scenes which we do with the pencil. So find scene if you don’t know what the scene looks like, it starts with a slug line which says interior third track night or exterior drainage this day or exterior drainage each night whatever and beside the first one you write a number one.

Then continuing to the second scene you write number two followed by three and then of course my personal favorite for and on through the whole script. Then you grab a box of markers and get ready to color. Pay attention because here comes the code. Principal cast is red, background is green, feature background is yellow, stunts is orange and special effects are blue, props is purple, vehicle then was at pink, sound effects is brown, wardrobe get circled, hair and make up gets asterisk and special equipment gets put in the box.

Grab your markers, grab your script and go scene by scene, underline all the pertinent information and you’ll end up with one sexy, classy, stylish document. So on that part of the breakdown process is done. We need to find the way to compare the relative lengths of each scene and this was where film scheduling and pure production work it’s extremely tricky and very complicated so I’m going to need you to pay very close attention to what I’m saying and doing.

What you do is you take your page of number and colored script and lay it flat on the desk in front of you and clearing your mind and soul of anxiety, fear and worry. So that your hands act with clear and purposeful intention, you grip the top of the page and bring it down to meet the bottom of the page and flatten and repeat and repeat. What you end up, with thanks to the power of physics and math is a page of broken down script that’s been divided into eight one-inch chunks and because film people are extremely creative these eight one-inch chunks of page are referred to as page eight and page eights are use to describe the full length of a scene in a script.

So you go through and you see how many chunks make up your scenes. So scene one is one chunk, so it’s one eight and scene is also one chunk, so it’s one eight. Scene three is one eight, and scene four is one, two, three, four, five eights. So what we have now is not a script anymore. It’s a blue print from which we can extract all kinds of valuable information really easily and what we do is we take information like actors, like wardrobe, like stunts, like props and lengths of scenes and suck those out and we take that information and we jam into a thing called page breakdown sheet which I am not going to talk about right now because I’m boring myself so badly I’m going to barf on my desk.