Properly Labeling Shots and Scenes

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pepper jack

After you guys have your screenplay written and you are putting together a shooting script that lays out each shot and scene. How do you guys label it?

Let's say we have an exterior scene of a man parking his car in the driveway, getting out, checking his mail and then his neighbor comes up and talks to him. Let's say I want this to be in a series of shots as follows: an establishing shot of the car pulling up and the man getting out, then a closer shot of the man going into the mailbox, and then the standard 5 shots of the conversation, a neutral master and then each person getting an over the shoulder and a closer up shot.

Would I label these as 1A, 1B, 1C respectively? Also how would I label the 5 separate shots of the conversation? They would all be under the 1C scene correct?
 
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Figure out your camera setups for each scene and then yeah, 1A, 1B, etc. That's what I do anyway.

If it gets to a high enough setup count you'd probably want to skip over the letters O, S, and Z since they could look like 0, 5, and 2 on a slate.
 
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So simply each camera setup? So for the 5 different setups that I have of the same dialogue would each be a consecutive letter (1C, 1D, 1E, 1F, 1G)?

I figured I was over thinking this a bit much.
 
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I'll sometimes take a copy of the script and draw vertical lines through the scene with different colored highlighters to clearly indicate which setups are covering which pieces of a scene. You don't necessarily, for example, need an extreme closeup of one actor for an entire dialog scene, but you might want one for a small section for reaction, or a particular line, etc.

I don't know if there are really hard and fast rules on this exactly.. find what works best for you, and do it that way. But yes, you'll want a way to differentiate between the various setups both for your shooting schedule (so you know you got everything shot) and for your logs for use in editing.

For use in editing it might be good to annotate that 1A is a master, 1B is a medium close up tracking shot, etc.. That way when you go to edit you won't have to hunt through all the footage for that one camera setup you know you got but don't remember which it was. ;)
 
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The script's scenes should be numbered, and then each shot in the shot list can be numbered as 1A, 1B etc.

Every scene (I.e. Every time there's a new scene heading) has an incremental number. The only time there would be a scene 1C is if there were script changes during the shoot.
 
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In shooting scripts though, at least the ones I have read on dailyscripts.com, they don't have every single shot in them. Shouldn't the OP put every shot on a separate shot list, rather than a locked script?

As far as setting up the shoots, my personal opinion is to go do a carefully planned master shot of the whole scene, but you only have to do certain lines on close ups and OTS shots, as this will save time on location, and you have the master of the whole scene as a safety. Of course you will want other shots too like certain insert shots when needed, etc.
 
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harmonica44 said:
In shooting scripts though, at least the ones I have read on dailyscripts.com, they don't have every single shot in them.
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Why would it?

The reason for (hand writing) a shot list on a script is to visually see which portions of action and dialog are covered by which shots. Yes, a separate typed shot list also makes sense.
 
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