'Xopun' four-day schedule: the bungalow that locks the shoot
Pre-production on 'Xopun', a 14-minute fiction film. Four shoot days: 22–25 June. The tea estate near Jorhat has permitted shooting on all four days, but its bungalow is occupied until the 23rd and is free for interiors only on 24 and 25 June. The lead actress is available on 22, 23 and 24 June only. The child actor, aged nine, can be on set only from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. each day. The script has nine scenes: scenes 1–3 are in the bungalow and need both the lead and the child; scenes 4–6 are in the tea rows and at the river ghat and need the lead only; scenes 7–9 are at the school and the railway station and need the child only, plus 20 extras at the station. The forecast gives a 70% chance of rain on 24 and 25 June. The gimbal and the generator are booked for 24 June and cannot be moved.
1. Identify the binding constraint in this schedule and calculate the actual shooting hours available for scenes 1–3. Is the schedule as written feasible?
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Build a window table before touching the order:
- Lead: 22, 23, 24.
- Child: 22–25, but only 08:00–13:00.
- Bungalow interiors: 24 and 25 only.
- Gimbal/generator: 24 only.
- Rain risk: 24 and 25.
Scenes 1–3 need all three resources at once, so the intersection is 24 June, 08:00–13:00 - five clock hours, minus about 30 minutes of child breaks and reset, so roughly 4.5 usable hours.
Those three scenes are dialogue between an adult and a nine-year-old. Even at a lean 8–10 set-ups a scene, that is 25–30 set-ups in 4.5 hours, about nine minutes a set-up, with a child whose concentration runs in 20–25 minute blocks and who legally should not be pushed past that. On paper it is not feasible; in practice what happens is the crew rushes, the child tires, and all three scenes end up half-covered and unusable in the edit.
So the schedule as written is infeasible, but the infeasibility is not where it looks. The actress's dates cost money to move and the school calendar is fixed. The bungalow is the only soft constraint in the chain - the owner is a phone call, not a contract. That is where the fix goes.
2. Propose a revised four-day schedule and state, in order, what you would renegotiate first. Justify the order.
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Renegotiation order (cheapest first):
- Ask the estate owner for the bungalow on 23 June as well - a courtesy request plus a token location fee, no schedule risk.
- Ask the child's school for an 08:00–14:00 release on one day only.
- Book the 20 station extras in a tight three-hour window to control cost, not a full day.
- Only if all three fail: collapse scene 3 into a single verandah shot, or drop it and cover it with a line of dialogue.
Revised schedule (assuming the bungalow opens on 23):
- 22 June, AM (child): scene 7 at the school, then scene 8 at the station with 20 extras from 10:30 to 13:00 - extras are called for a short window, and the child's hours are used where the crowd cost is highest.
- 22 June, PM (lead only): scenes 4 and 5 in the tea rows on natural light until about 17:30.
- 23 June, AM (lead + child): scenes 1 and 2 in the bungalow, pre-lit the evening of 22nd.
- 23 June, PM: scene 3 in the bungalow or on the verandah, then scene 6 at the ghat in the golden-hour window 16:30–18:00.
- 24 June (gimbal, generator, 70% rain): no cast needed - loom inserts, hands, props, estate establishing shots, gimbal moves along the covered verandah, all shootable under cover.
- 25 June: weather cover, ghat wides, drone/establishing, pick-ups.
The logic is that exteriors go early into the better-forecast days, the rain-proof interiors sit on the risky days because that is when the bungalow is free anyway, and the most expensive cast combination is never squeezed into a single five-hour block.
3. It rains heavily on 22 and 23 June instead of 24 and 25. What is your contingency, given that the budget has no spare day?
Read the worked answer
First, price the damage precisely: the rain moves onto the two days carrying all four exteriors (the school yard, the station platform, the tea rows, the ghat), while the interior days are unaffected. The schedule does not collapse; it inverts, and the internals of the plan - the bungalow on 24–25 - suddenly become the safe ground.
So the contingency is layered, and none of it is a spare day:
- Shoot masters first, coverage second. In every exterior scene, get the wide master on the first or second take while light exists. A rain-out then costs coverage, not the scene, and coverage can be cheated with inserts on 25.
- Embrace continuity. If it is already raining, shoot the scene wet and keep it wet - overcast light is soft and consistent, and a wet tea estate looks better than a dry one. The killer is a scene half-shot in sun and half in rain.
- Use the interior days as the rain days. Move the school-yard scene inside to a corridor where the story allows it, or shoot the station scene under the platform roof - platforms are covered, and a rainy platform is more atmospheric than a dry one.
- Pre-plan the sacrificial scene. With no buffer day, something must be droppable before the shoot, not on the last night. Scene 3 is the candidate: an empty bungalow shot plus a voice-over line carries the same story information at the cost of one set-up.
What you must not do is what usually happens: keep the original order, lose a day, and cut the scene you actually needed in the edit rather than the one you chose to lose in prep.