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Old 07-10-2016, 11:02 PM   #28
Marwhini
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Join Date: Jun 2016
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Marwhini has just left Hobbiton.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nerwen View Post
Marwhini
At least, that's how it appears to me... Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but then where do "technically" and "usual formulae" come into it?
Technically, as in according the rules they teach at UCLA on Screenwriting.

But that would be applying a roughly 30 minute per chapter formula (using the 9 - 12 hour estimate), given more attention to some details, and visuals. It isn't that hard to squeeze 10 more minutes into each chapter (on average) by simply adding a few seconds into each shot/scene.

That would add up quickly, and would not slow things down significantly.

Quote:
But why is it "all that needs to be addressed"? I've already pointed out some obvious issues.
The 20 minutes, average, per chapter is all that needs to be considered in getting a six-hour long production (technically six-hours and twenty-minutes).

You don't need to worry about breaking down the page-count, because you can just work to try to make it so that the length each Chapter covers averages out to 20-minutes per chapter.

So you might have some chapters that are dealt with in 15 minutes (or maybe even 10-minutes or less), and some chapters that are dealt with in 25-minutes to 30-minutes (or longer).

As you keep pointing out, pacing for the chapters will be different, allowing some things to be dealt with rather quickly, and other things that might need greater exposition, visualization, or narrative.

With 19 chapters, times 20-minutes per chapter, that is 380-minutes, or 6.33 Hours.

Leaving each "Episode" at roughly 2.11 hours, on average (or roughly 127 minutes each, minus credits, and any Intro).

Quote:
Depends entirely on what happens in the chapter. All they do in the first one is have dinner- and in fact that *was* treated at length in AUJ and is perhaps the single thing in that film to have drawn the most criticism.

That's the basic point I'm trying to get across. *Pacing* is very important in a film. Why do you think "The Hobbit"- a fairly typical novel- is suitable for a 1:1 adaptation?
The 1:1 is an AVERAGE, meaning that not every page is going to result in a full-minute.

But that is averages out for such.

That is why it is called a "heuristic" (meaning "Rule of Thumb" or "best guess" or "approximation" - technically it is Greek for "That which is found by accident/unusual").

Some pages of the Novel might not warrant more than a few seconds of screen-time.

While others might warrant five minutes of screen-time.

The point being that when all is said-and-done, they average out to about 1-minute per page.

That is pretty much the rule (Heuristic) that they work toward, or use when dealing with estimating how much screen-time is going to be created for a given script.

The estimation might not work out to be 100% accurate, but when you take a long at all movies produced, and compare their length to the script that produced them, you get that relative 1:1 rule (page of script per minute of scene/screen-time).

When estimating a budget for a production, that is how Film is bought, and how to estimate production budgets. I have only taken a few Film Classes, mostly dealing with VFX and Writing. But it is a subject that I have had to go over when looking at how much it is going to cost us to shoot the documentary we hope to do in the next couple of years.

The budget might go over, or under that estimate, but that is what they use to get a "bust guess" when looking at financing a production. And it seems to be pretty reliable, assuming that you have records of the average number of takes for a scene that your director usually uses; with a new director, you have to just make a best guess there, but they have a heuristic for that too (never having wanted to Direct, I never looked into it).

MB
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