Chalk Hill Books

Reviewed by Robert Latham Brown
Human beings are primarily visual animals. By this, I mean that we have spent eons evolving to interpret the world through our eyes. What's that long dark sinuous object lying on the ground that you see out of the corner of your eye? Is it a snake or a stick? Your brain has decided what it is and taken action even before you turn to look at it directly. Why? Because all the humans and human antecedents that survived by avoiding the snake and ignoring the stick contributed their genes to you.

Wouldn't you like to take advantage of this in your films? Wouldn't you like to tap into those deep seated instinctual reactions that we have to visual stimuli? Wouldn't you like to know how to affect your audience emotionally by how you set up your shots? Well now you can. In The Visual Story, Bruce Block reveals all of those instinctual ways that we react to images. He explores all of the visual components that go into an image and shows how to structure your images to help tell your story. He says that the biggest mistake you can make in your film is to ignore visual structure.

The worst thing you can do is to make no choice. Remember that if you choose not to control the visual components, they will structure themselves anyway and the audience will react to that structure. The resulting uncontrolled structure will probably work against the telling of your story. —The Visual Story, p.216.

Does he know what he is talking about? Yes he does. But don't just take my word for it. Bruce Block has served as a producer and visual consultant for directors such as  James Brooks (Terms of Endearment), Nancy Meyers (What Women Want), Jay Roach, (Austin Powers, Meet the Parents), and Charles Shyer (Father of the Bride, The Necklace). And as a filmmaker, can you afford not to read this book?

SPREADSHEET BUDGETING
BoilerPlate Budgeting Templates
by
Robert Latham Brown

Years ago in the early days of personal computers, I used a spread sheet program in my original attempt to put a film budget on a computer. It is only fitting, that the first of these reviews be about BoilerPlate Budgeting Templates by BBP Software of Burlingame, California (www.boilerplate.net). The $99 software package (available for both Windows and Mac) consists of a sophisticated Microsoft Excel workbook template and is accompanied by an extensive help manual sheet in the workbook. The help manual can be easily printed by clicking on a button at the top of the help manual worksheet.

If you are familiar with film budgets and Microsoft Excel, you already know how to use this software package to create a complete budget. If you are new to film budgeting, BoilerPlate Budgeting provides a lot of help to get you started. When you first open the template, you are greeted with a splash screen (see fig. 1). Clicking on the “Begin at Globals…” button takes you to the Globals worksheet (fig. 2). At the top of this sheet you enter standard information about your production as shown in the illustration. Below the production information is a place for you to enter payroll tax and union fringe rates. These are used throughout the budget to calculate your payroll taxes and fringe benefits. The template allows you to enter up to two different sets of rates, but only one rate for each item can be used at any one time in your budget. In other words, if you are shooting in both California and Arizona, you cannot use both the California Workers’ Comp rates for the California hires and the Arizona Workers’ Comp rates for the Arizona hires at the same time. This brings me to the first of my few niggling criticisms. There doesn’t seem to be a way of automatically including the cut-offs for the various fringes and taxes. For instance, Federal Unemployment Insurance (FUI) need only be calculated on the first $7,000 of each employee’s pay. However, using this template would calculate each employee’s FUI on his or her gross salary. The author does give you an opportunity to include a correction figure (circled in red in fig. 3) on the Fringe Worksheets (tabs 1900, 4300, and 5200). I wouldn’t know what amount to enter here without having to calculate the correct fringes manually. If you do not enter an amount, the net effect is to pad your fringe account to some extent.

Once your globals are entered, you can move on to the detail sheets. Each major account (Story, Producers, Direction, Cast Production Staff, etc.) has its own worksheet. A few accounts, such as Cast and Transportation, have more than one worksheet. The author’s laudable intent has been to require you to enter each piece of information only once. We have already seen this in the template’s use of global values for fringes, taxes, and shooting days. This single-entry principle is extended as you fill in the detail sheets. For example, as you fill in the Cast detail, you are simultaneously creating a cast list. As you fill in the details for the Locations account, you create a locations list. This holds true for Extras and Props as well.

My second criticism is that in filling in the detail sheets, the number of shooting days is already filled in for you. Normally this would be a plus, but all below-the-line crew members are budgeted by days rather than weeks, even the weekly employees. This means, if you are paying your production manager DGA scale weekly, you must figure out what his or her daily rate would be in order to enter the proper cost. “So, just take the weekly and divide by 5,” you might assume. That would work in town, but on a distant location it becomes more complicated when you realize that the DGA requires that distant location work be paid at seven-fifths the in-town rate, plus the shooting fee (if you are filming). How do you budget a partial week on location? To answer my own question, film budgets are estimates. But you would like to have your guess be as accurate as possible. (As long as we are in the Production Staff account, it should be noted that the UPM’s salary is included in the IA fringe and not in DGA fringe as it should be.)

A few other minor complaints: In account 2100, payroll taxes are applied to the Studio Teacher, but no IA fringes. In Los Angeles, teachers receive IA fringes. In account 2700, the Swing Gang is budgeted only for the shoot days; no prep or wrap is included. And finally, in account 2300 Set Construction, the set cost is not budgeted per set but by how much labor over how much time. This can be a rational way to approach set construction, but my experience is that the size of the set construction crew varies widely over the period depending on what the demand is. The template allows you only to budget a set amount of crew over three separate periods: prep, production, and wrap.

Almost all of my complaints, other than the lack of cut-offs on fringes, can be easily fixed with a little working knowledge of Excel. In some instances, it’s as easy as changing the reference to a cell. However, you will need to know how to unprotect a worksheet and then reset the protection when you are done. This is easily learned, but may be an aspect of Excel you have not confronted before.
The top sheet (fig. 4) is filled in automatically as you enter information on the account detail worksheets. As you work, you always have the budget total in view on each sheet. Any changes you make are instantly calculated through the budget. In short, you have the full power of Microsoft Excel working for you.

The template provides worksheets for what it labels “Cash Flow.” In my experience, a cash flow is an estimate of what monies you will spend when. It is created by taking your budget and spreading it over the calendar weeks of your production, showing how much will be spent in each account in each week. This is vitally useful in planning how much money to withdraw (and thus incur interest charges on) for each week of your production. The Cash Flow worksheets in this template serve more of an accounting function. It is a place where you can record money spent in each account, and in doing so, will give you a running balance of what is left. This would be useful for estimating a cost to complete, although on larger pictures, I would recommend using an accounting software package such as those provided by payroll companies.

The template excels (no pun intended) in printing reports. The printing panel (fig. 5) allows you to print a wide variety of reports at the push of a button. In addition, you can print any individual worksheet by clicking on the worksheet’s tab and using the Excel File-Print menu choice.

I am impressed with the complexity and thoroughness of the templates. The author has provided a quick and inexpensive way to create a complete and fairly accurate budget. It is best suited for smaller, less complex projects, but would be an excellent tool for anyone who isn’t ready to spend $499 on the industry standard.