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Matt: while on vacation in March I received a call from a colleague who wanted to leave a feature film project he was committed to as 1st AD in favour of a high profile TV show that would run for several months. It was two weeks before they started filming the project – All By Love – and he wanted to know whether I would be prepared to take over. He assured me it was already scheduled and everything would be okay. As fully understanding his thought processes on the phone about a script I’d never read would be impossible – and as we couldn’t go through the schedule together before I started (and knowing things would ultimately change) – I realized I would have to be reschedule as soon as I possibly could.

Aubs: The original 1st AD and I had a gentleman’s agreement. I knew the low wages I was offering would carry no weight should the opportunity to work on a fully budgeted project come along. The agreement was that he would give me two weeks’ notice and find his own replacement. Sure enough, the dreaded call came, but I had hoped that if it did come we would be some way into the shoot, so that at least the new 1st would be stepping into a crew that had found their feet and were working to a rhythm.

Matt: My 2nd AD Jim Klass and I met the director, James Derbyshire, and the producer, Aubs Tredget, at James’ house in Wimbledon the day I flew back from vacation. Although we gelled, we all knew just how serious the situation was, especially as I was only going to be available for one week’s prep. Aubs was particularly concerned, and it quickly became apparent to me that the schedule was going to have to be both tight and flexible given the locations they wanted to use and the time they had available. What’s more this was James’s directorial debut.

Aubs: We met in the living room with print-outs of the original one-liner and copies of the script laid out on a coffee table. I knew the schedule was a big task. We had several heavy days – including nine and 11 pages – and I needed people who could and would carefully monitor and manipulate the schedule to maximize every second. I knew it was possible, as I’d done it before, but only with meticulous planning. It was bad enough having the DP shooting commercials during the last week of prep, but now my prospective 1st was telling me he’d only be available for one of the two weeks I had left.

Matt: Two months before this, another 1st AD, Henry Tomlinson, suggested I test-drive a new piece of scheduling software called The Scheduler from WattWenn. After my first run through with developers I was extremely pleased to see that you can import the script directly into the software. Naturally, this means a lot less typing and far less chance of making mistakes, so I could do the breakdown much faster. Nevertheless, I wasn’t looking forward to telling the producer I wasn’t going to use the industry standard, Movie Magic.

Aubs: I’d never heard of The Scheduler. And I had never used anything other than Movie Magic. And none of the 1st ADs I’d ever worked with had used anything else either. But as the schedule is always the AD’s domain, I’d never thought to question it or look for anything different. What I did know is that when the crew is under pressure, keying in re-writes and amendments is when errors are most likely to creep in. Equipment and props are accidentally omitted, locations mixed up, timings go awry – although enough I’ve never left an artist off a call sheet. James seemed to warm to both Matt and Jim Klass, so despite my reservations I agreed. James was going to need a sympathetic team to help him through: a complex romantic comedy in a short shoot period is a big ask of any director.

Matt: On the first day of prep, I arrived at the production office at White Light in Wimbledon with my laptop and a final draft version of the script. I started the process of importing the script at 9.30. Here’s how it went:

9:30am. To import the script from Final Draft into The Scheduler you need to use the .rtf version, which takes about a minute. After the file has been imported it will ask you for the script length; from this information it will automatically work out the page counts for each scene.

The Scheduler has a number of different interactive windows. The script appears in the Script Window; whereas the Scene Window gives a breakdown of the various scene elements – INT/EXT, location, time of day, etc – all taken from the Final Draft scene headers. Also included are the speaking roles, scene numbers and, if you have input the script length, the length of each scene in pages (or mins/secs). Having the script on screen makes a huge difference, as I find this speeds up the whole breakdown process.

Next I added the synopses. These can be taken from the script by copy/paste or typed and summarized with your own interpretation of the scene. I then moved into the Editor section to add extras and non-speaking roles into scenes. As you click on each role, it is highlighted in the script. This makes it easy to check if the role is really in the scene or a ghost, such as Ophelia in this scene set in Ophelia’s Bar.

11:15am. The breakdown was complete and I was ready for the initial stage of scheduling.

Aubs: When Matt arrived on the Monday before we started shooting I had a back-up plan. Having only ever been on the receiving end of Movie Magic, I knew what to expect, but would have no time to learn it if things went badly. I’d used Microsoft Excel on shorts and at University to create stripboards – you can sort using multiple criteria. It’s an amazing piece of accounting software, but I didn’t fancy using it on a feature. Nevertheless, if it became apparent that we couldn’t follow the schedule in a meaningful way I would resort to that. At first glance, The Scheduler desktop looked like a photocopier menu system – very Mac – but as the fields populated with the script I relaxed a little. The information seemed to interrelate and Matt seemed to be able to manipulate it pretty easily.

Matt: Now onto the fun part – the scheduling. With The Scheduler you spend very little time working in strips. For anyone brought up on working with strips on the wall or covering a table, this can be a bit of a leap. You are still arranging groups of scenes that should be shot together, but you use a couple of tools to make life easier.

First I made some Sorts. Here you just click to select the criteria you want to sort (as many as you want), name it and click on ‘Sort’. It appears in the Sort Results window straight away, and whenever you make an editing change to the main file, the Sort updates immediately.

The larger Sorts can be moved into Sortboards and arranged in smaller groups before assigning them to a Shooting Day. There are nine Sortboards, so you can store the arrangements of groups in the way that make most sense. You can also keep multiple versions of the schedule in the Stripstores (I made six during prep and seven during production). All the scenes need to be assigned to a Shooting Day, but this can be done from the Scene Window. Sorts or Sortboards appear in strips, and you can add notes and fine-tune the schedule.

12.30pm. Three hours into the scheduling and we were able to issue a completed schedule to all the relevant members of the production. Using The Scheduler had freed up time that I could now spend with the director James Derbyshire and the DP Ed Mash.

Aubs: I have to confess that when Matt brought me his draft schedule at lunchtime on day one of his pre-production I had mixed feelings. The old-fashioned producer in me worried that he hadn’t taken enough time to absorb the script and get a feel for what we wanted to achieve. However, the new producer in me with a grueling shoot in front of him – and a list of locations reliant on as many favors and goodwill as they did location fees – was relieved. I now had something solid to give to my coordinator Nadine Smith and location manager, Fiona Elliot.

Matt: Once the schedule is in place, the distribution and sharing of other information is remarkably easy. The Scheduler enabled me to distribute the ‘Day out of Days’ (DOD) with the clever use of HTML. This was particularly useful, as a lot of key personnel were otherwise engaged on other jobs, and so were working away from the office. Casting coordinator Alice Gardener (who was eventually to become my 3rd AD) found it particularly useful for coordinating the 250 extras we needed. She didn’t need any application other than an internet browser and could log in from wherever she was to keep track of the changes from her email.

Aubs: We had swollen our ranks with an army of 20 volunteers – a great accomplishment and resource, if something of a strain on the catering budget – as well as securing a great team of professionals. The only problem was that, in the final weeks of pre-production, all but the production office, volunteers and the art department were working on commercials or finishing off other projects. This meant the schedule information had to be distributed far and wide, and to a posse of individuals who’d never been on a film set, let alone looked at a strip board.

The Scheduler’s ability to export in .rtf and tab-delimited files, as well HTML and PDFs, meant that relevant people and departments could open the information in their preferred program and operating system. The information was also laid out very clearly. For example, the Day out of Days in HTML made it easy for our volunteers to receive and decipher the information for themselves. Matt: James, Ed and I spent as much time as we could in front of a white board, drawing diagrams of the various locations and mapping out camera angles, careful not to cross the line, and revising them to minimize the number of moves in order for us to maximize our shoot time in the locations. This meant we were constantly reviewing the running order of scenes and fine-tuning the schedule, so much so that the overworked office was struggling to keep track of the latest edition of the schedule. A quick call to the developers resulted in an addition to the system to show a time and date stamp every time I issued a schedule. At last everyone was working off the latest version. This has now been included in Version 1.0.

Aubs: The production team worked long and hard, the pace of change was tough – exacerbated by the fact that the production staff were all PC users, while Matt, The Scheduler and the rest of the crew appeared to be Mac. Transferring files from Matt’s Mac to our PCs was a recurring problem. We originally thought it was a compatibility issue between Mac and PC, but Matt assured us it could not be. After consulting the developers it was traced to a problem we had with PC USB memory sticks we were using to pass files around the office. Consequently, mistakes were made, as sometimes the differences between versions, although vital, were subtle. With rehearsals, costume fittings, camera tests and location recces, I would have liked to test the Diary function as a means of collating all the information that was swimming round in my head in a manner that could be integrated with other production data. It looked easy enough. From what Matt showed me it seemed to be laid out in a sensible and logical manner, displayed in a clean way. But I was on a PC!

Matt: Day one was weird. A $3.5 million warehouse apartment in a trendy part of town where film crews are completely unwelcome. The equipment had been delivered over the weekend and crew arrived as inconspicuously as possible for breakfast. We stood around over coffee and croissants, in our socks for fear of treading too heavily on squeaky floorboards, and talking in whispers. The day started well enough and the crew found their feet and started working together, despite having to be acutely aware of the location’s sensitivity. But by lunchtime the neighbours were on to us and I left it to the producer to answer the knocks on the door.

Aubs: I’d been confident throughout pre-production that once we started shooting – when I’d finally got them out of the office – things would settle down. This proved to be somewhat optimistic as the neighbors at our first location objected to their personal piece of real estate heaven being used for filming. I’d learnt to talk people ‘down’ so to speak as a location manager in Australia, and foremost in my mind was that, due to cast availability, we’d have to return to this location. I liaised with the location owner constantly and it quickly became apparent the schedule would have to be revised continuously as he learnt of new ‘neighborhood’ events that prevented us returning on a particular given day.

Matt: This is where logic behind the Sortboards really helps – I was able to make the adjustments quickly, keeping the crew and production office informed and the shoot on track. This system is so easy that my 2nd, Jim, learnt to adjust the schedule and issue new versions over a cup of coffee. Putting the scenes in a running order or changing the order is remarkably simple (like anything with Mac). In the Scene Window there is a heading of ‘Days’. Under this heading is displayed the Shoot Day, in which the scene is scheduled. By double-clicking this and changing the day, it updates the Strips Window automatically. Another simple solution is to move and manipulate the schedule in the Strips Window. This is done by the simplest of actions: drag and drop.

Aubs: Having Matt or Jim email different version of the schedule to the office rather than using our USB memory sticks was how we got around our Mac–PC compatibility problems. It also sped up the office response times. We were lucky that the apartment was the only truly difficult location and that subsequently all we had to worry about was rain, freezing temperatures, the general public, traffic noise and actors’ availability. It did mean we tested our other locations’ patience though, as we were forced to review the schedule constantly, depending on when we thought we could get back into the apartment. The further the shoot progressed, the fewer options that were open to us, though, as our 17th century mansion was in demand for weddings and our funky lounge bar was scheduled for renovation.

Matt: Jim, like other people, was surprised at the ease of working with The Scheduler and the simplicity of its layout. He still had to enter information into Call Sheets, but WattWenn already has a way to copy this across, which will be incorporated into future versions. The Scheduler is also able to print out Daily Sides, so we didn’t have to carry around those huge lever arch files with copies of the script or send the production office scurrying to the photocopier to re-size the originals. Having the script already in The Scheduler meant that adjustments and amendments to the script were simply ‘cut and pasted’ in. Details such as page-count, location and artists are automatically updated. Splitting scenes was easy too. When split, The Scheduler renumbers with a suffix; however, prefixes aren’t yet supported.

Aubs: The rest of the shoot, though a test of endurance and patience, went pretty smoothly. By day three I’d stopped worrying about the fact we weren’t using Movie Magic. We were getting the information we needed quickly and in a versatile format. For me, the schedule is always the 1st’s prerogative, and they need to be comfortable with what they are using. Matt obviously loved The Scheduler and, most importantly, he got me the information I needed when I needed it, and this has not always been the case. I can also see The Scheduler’s potential for budgeting. Breakdowns are efficiently extracted with little effort, and if properly integrated with Excel I feel it would be very handy during development and the early stages of pre. I also see the potential for a networked file-share version, where a ‘super user’ might control the data input, but different departments/people, such as make-up and wardrobe, could extract the information they required. Maybe one day when I own my own studio…

Matt: For me The Scheduler is a leap forward in scheduling. Even though it is only in version 1.0, it is stable and lets you work productively and quickly. However, you do need to move away from the old approach to scheduling to get the most from this innovative system.

• The Scheduler runs on a Mac (PowerPC or Intel) with OSX 10.3.4+. A 30-day test drive is available at www.wattwenn.com

The Scheduler

Matt Lawson/Aubs Tredget