Production Pace Quotes

TV is designed a certain way where you have three, four days on stage and three or four days out. You're basically making a feature every seven days. You have to shoot an hour's worth.

Things move so quickly on set. When you're about to do another take and you have a minute to figure out what you're doing, you just kind of determine how you're going to do it on the spot.

Working on a film is so great because you have the luxury of more time when you're on a movie than when you're on television.

Looking back now on our workload, I just shake my head at our pace. 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' was my first series, so I didn't know anything about that when I started. I just assumed it was normal to make 26 episodes a year on a seven-day shooting schedule.

That's the thing about 'The Daily Show' - we're doing four shows a week, so we can't be too precious about what's going on.

I think the rigors of a TV schedule are brutal and 'Six Feet Under' wasn't a network schedule. We did 13 shows, we didn't do 22. I don't know how people do that. I really don't. I mean the shows are shorter, but wow, it's quite a discipline.

A big budget studio film is slower, they've got so much to create around you. Everything is more complicated.

I like alternating commercials with movies, because it keeps the pace up. You can't slack on a commercial. You need to go fast. That's a terrific piece of action, I think if that was scheduled for a movie, you'd put that in for two or three days worth of work.

We used to make a 'Tom and Jerry' short every six weeks and they were about six minutes long, so we were producing about a minute of animation a week.

In film, you get to take your time and make it right. In TV, it's all about the schedule. The train is moving and you sometimes just don't have time to make things right, which is painful 'cause you know it could be done better and you just have no choice.

A lot of feature films do two pages a day.

When I was making films, we had a lot of time for the fighting scenes. But in TV, we don't have much time to think about how to do the fighting, because there are only seven days for an episode. You have to hurry. This is a challenge.

Film and television, one is generally faster. Television generally moves faster in terms of directing, schedules and getting things done. Film, you're on a pretty tight schedule, so the process is the dame.

Film and television are very different. On the TV show, we do seven or eight scenes a day, so time and money are of the essence, and we have zero room for creativity because you've got to do each scene in only five takes. Whereas, on a film, you have an entire day to film one scene, so you have so much time to choose how you want to fill in a scene.

To get into the process of doing back-to-back films, it takes getting a little used to.

Some scenes comes together really quickly, and some scenes are disasters that take forever. But it sort of works itself out over time.

Acting in TV as opposed to films is really difficult. What a film gets two months to do, we get eight days to do.

With everything that I've done with YouTube and podcasts for so many years, it's been: you can record it, edit, and then upload that day. With the book and documentary, it's been such a longer process.

I'd had the theater background for so long that I know that world inside out; I just didn't know the pace of how a TV set works, like how a show shoots.

Shooting a season can be a grind. It can be seven to eight months of work. Once you stop, it slows down any momentum you had.

We work the full year round to make 10 or 12 episodes, and 'The Good Wife' makes, like, 26 in that time or something, which I can't believe. I don't know how they do it.

You know, even with the 'Awkward Black Girl' episodes, they come out once a month. That's great for me, it's comfortable, it gives each time to digest, time for new people to get on to it and caught up, but oftentimes I have people who are almost demanding a higher output from me.

It's amazing, the quality of good work that happened in the fifties when a series would have to turn out 30-some episodes a season - it's amazing that 'I Love Lucy' was as good as it was!

When movie people go over into television, it's a little bit of a shock. It's much faster-paced. Everything is really last-minute. You won't know your schedule for the next episode until the last minute.

The first record we made, we recorded and mixed in a day. The second record was recorded and mixed in a week. The third was recorded and mixed in a month, and 'New Wave' was mixed and recorded in six months. It was an epic project.