This is the part of making a film - any film of any budget or scale - where it starts to "get real". The script has been through a couple of drafts and revisions, the money is there, cast and crew are coming together, dates have been chosen...and it's time to figure out how to make it actually happen - how to translate words on page into images, sounds, and dramatic narrative.
Preproduction: the art of allocating resources for maximum effect.
Alfred Hitchcock famously storyboarded every last shot and planned every detail. He did not want to get to the set not knowing what to do. On our film we're taking the same approach - doing as much thinking as possible before the expensive part begins. That's what shooting is: the expensive part. "Time is money" has literal meaning at that point, and every moment you spend thinking through something that you could have figured out beforehand is a moment wasted. There are more than enough decisions to keep everyone occupied, even with the most meticulous of planning.
There are filmmakers (many of them quite famous) who trust more in "the moment", in the spontaneity of the creative process, and who feel that too much planning straightjackets their mojo. Nonsense. Planning well reduces anxiety and frees up the creative juices. When you have a plan, you can relax, knowing that, if all else fails, you can just follow the storyboard. It gives you more freedom, not less, to have things mapped out to the Nth degree. And it's a lifesaver when the hour is late, the light is going, and you absolutely, positively have to get the shot or the scene won't make any sense. You can go on autopilot and point to the plan. Better than Xanax at stopping an anxiety attack.
Stanley Kubrick, in his acceptance speech for the the DW Griffith Lifetime Achievement Award from the Director's Guild of America, said that the process of filmmaking is a bit like trying to write War And Peace while riding in a bumper car at an amusement park. Very apt, and somewhat ironic, as Kubrick famously shot sometimes hundreds of takes and dozens of setups, most often "shooting from the hip" (his words), to find the perfect moments from which to craft his film in the editing room.
But that doesn't mean he didn't have a plan. He also was famously efficient with resources, keeping the crew small and expenses low. Every dollar went on the screen, and his per-day shooting costs were absurdly low for the size of his productions. Who else could have shot more than 300 days on The Shining, over more than a year, in cavernous sets, with the top actor of the day for his lead, an average of 50 takes for each shot, and still brought it in for $20 million? He somehow managed to lavish frankly excessive attention and time on projects, while keeping the budget at about the same level as most Hollywood films made in 1/5th the time. His planning - no less meticulous than Hitchcock's - was directed at reducing the costs to the point where he could afford a level of craftsmanship rarely equaled.
Well, we can't do a Kubrick. We're going to have about two weeks for Principal Photography and that's it. But we can do a Hitchcock, and make sure every moment on the set is accounted for before we even start. That way when the other bumper car slams into us, as it inevitably will many times, can can calmly pick up our pen and paper, and keep writing that masterpiece without losing our train of thought.
