Organizing Production on The Sojourn

Hey everyone,

Larissa here, Associate Producer for The Sojourn!

Today, in a fugue state of hyper-productivity, I finally put the ‘final touches’ on the spreadsheet the Sojourn production team uses for tracking actor recording sessions (final for now, knowing that I’ll probably make more changes in the future). This spreadsheet helps us know exactly which scenes have which characters, which recording dates are scheduled, and which scenes we’ve fully recorded so we can plan the assembly stage of the production process.

I’m ridiculously proud of this spreadsheet. It is, as far as I’m concerned, a marvel in organizational technique, and I want to show it off. So for those type-A among you who may find this interesting, this post will dive into the breakdown and recording process of Season 1 Episode 6 of The Sojourn.

The first step is to breakdown the episode. A breakdown is a list of all relevant things a script needs, sorted into scenes. This helps us determine a bunch of things, such as number of scenes, page counts for each scene, characters needing to be cast, and whether we need walla (background dialogue). The screenwriting software I’ve convinced (read: bullied) Daniel into using, Celtx, automatically generates a basic breakdown I use as a starting point.

It gives me a list of each scene, its setting, the characters in the scene, the number of lines they have, which page the scene is on, and how many pages the scene is. For example, scene three is set on the quarterdeck of the Shabayev, has five characters in it and how many lines they have, starts on page 3, and is 2 and 2/8ths pages long.

In film and television, pages are divided into 1/8ths, with each 1/8th equaling about 7.25 seconds of screentime (or 60 seconds for 8/8ths of a page). This makes it easier to determine the approximate runtime of each scene. For example, scene six is 3 and 6/8ths of a page, or about 3 minutes and 37 seconds.

The total page count of this episode is 32 and 4/8ths, or 32 minutes and 30 seconds. We generally try to keep our runtimes in this range, and therefore our page count in this range, because of budgetary constraints. Each page is very expensive to produce, so we have to plan accordingly.

I can now create a character list from this breakdown. This goes into its own spreadsheet (that I won’t be showing today, as it contains sensitive personal information) which has the character names, their actors, their contact information, and any other notes. Any characters which haven’t been cast are then pulled from this list and added to a public casting breakdown.

Next is making the recording breakdown sheet, which is my pride and joy. Let me show her to you, in all her glory:

There’s a lot going on here, so let me go through this with you.

This section is based on the breakdown Celtx provided, with additional information added such as the estimated run time and the runtime recorded during the cast readthrough. It also includes the script version at the top, so everyone on the production team knows we’re working from the same draft of the script.

OC and EC stand for “Opening Credits” and “Ending Credits” respectively, and “Effort” is any sounds we need the actors to make that aren’t dialogue, like grunts, sighs, or other non-verbal cues.

This matrix is our main tracking grid. Across the top row is every character who appears in the episode. The order is determined by our default top billing order, followed by special guest characters, then other characters by line count. We use this for determining the credits order for our IMDb listing and end credits script. Below that row is the scheduled recording date with the actor.

The tickboxes indicate which scenes each character appears in. As the actor records each scene, the box is ticked so we know which scenes are still to be recorded. The bottom row shows how many of that character’s scenes have been recorded out of their total, and the rightmost column shows how many characters in each scene have been recorded out of their total (hello Concatenate function, my new best friend). I’ve set up Conditional Formatting which changes the color of each box when certain conditions are met. For example, when the scene totals box turns orange, we know the scene is ready to send to the assembly editor, or if a box is dark grey, it means nothing has been done yet.

Lastly, I made a little progress bar so we can see how much we’ve accomplished so far. It’s pretty and good for morale, but not much else. For those curious, this is a “SPARKLINE” formula, you can google instructions for how to make them.

This spreadsheet has done a really good job keeping Daniel and myself on track for what needs to be recorded, which makes entering into the assembly stage much easier. It means we don’t need to reach out to the actors for additional recording sessions, causing unnecessary delays. Plus, watching that progress bar march forward is very satisfying.

If you want to create your own production, I hope you find this post helpful in your planning stages. If not, I hope you found this post at least mildly interesting, even if it’s just to laugh at my right-brain tendencies (Ravi is more like me than Cass is…).

Fair winds!