Native Sun Project

Native Sun

You are an Associate Producer for Convex Productions, a feature film production company headquartered in Burbank, California. Executive Producer Ben Parker has just purchased the rights to film a script entitled Native Sun, and needs you to draw up an approximate filming schedule. This rough-cut schedule is needed immediately to commence the process of recruiting investors, in that it can provide estimates of the overall funding and time that will be required to bring Native Sun to movie screens world-wide.

Script Summary

Native Sun is a feature-length science fiction film, staged 280 years in the future. The hero of the script is Matric Egregas, an orphaned human raised by a possessive clan of alien creatures called akatatars. Native Sun follows a "stranger in a strange land" theme as Mat is called to Earth on a business trip, accompanied by his extremely sociable brother Hern and fretful Uncle Kim. There they discover that Mat's salary and savings as a manager in his adopted family's shipping business easily make him one of the wealthiest people on an economically depressed Earth. Inexperienced in human affairs, he becomes involved with a woman named Christine Lee, and is eventually framed for her murder by Earth officials who mistake him for having political ambitions. Luckily, Mat's two ton fang-toothed brother Hern befriends another Earthling character named Jay Fowler, who helps the akatatars in the rescue of Mat. The plot ends triumphantly, with Mat proven innocent, corruption exposed, and the Egregas family reunited.

The Nature of Film Projects

The hundreds of scenes specified by the Native Sun script have been grouped into 53 filming tasks, or groups of scenes that require the same resources and are closely related within the plot of the movie. These 53 tasks are listed in Table 1 of this document, complete with information concerning which resources and how much time will be required to complete each one of them. Your approximate filming schedule should establish when each of these filming tasks will be completed, as well as the 20 additional supporting technical activities described in Table 2. Thus, you have a total of 73 tasks to coordinate into a rough-cut filming plan for the project Native Sun.

One issue of importance in project scheduling is precedence relationships between tasks. Precedence relationships dictate which tasks in a project absolutely must be finished before some other task can be started. Precedence relationships are often illustrated as network diagrams, such as the activity-on-the-node Native Sun diagram displayed in Exhibit 1 on page 12 of this document. Inspecting this network diagram, however, reveals an interesting characteristic of most film projects, including Native Sun. The broad, shallow shape displayed in Exhibit 1 is the direct result of the fact that there exist relatively few precedence relationships to illustrate, when compared to the overall number of tasks in the network. While there may be many tasks involved

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in filming a script, there is often considerable flexibility when scheduling the sequence in which such tasks are to be completed. The various scenes of a movie are seldom filmed in the order they appear in the finished story; rather, these scenes are filmed in whatever order is logistically convenient. Table 1 does list the filming tasks in the order that they appear in the plot of Native Sun, but this probably is not the order in which you will choose to complete them. The few existing precedence relationships in Native Sun as illustrated in Exhibit 1 can be summarized as:

* You must construct a movie set before you film on it.

* You must complete all filming requiring a particular movie set before you strike that

movie set (tear it down and remove it from the soundstage facility in which it was built).

* You must prepare a location before you film at that location.

Oddly, you needn't worry about any preparation or set building prior to filming any of the six filming tasks that require Unit #6. (These six tasks can be found arranged in a column on the far right-hand side of the Exhibit 1 network.) This is because Unit #6 is your special effects studio, The Visual Effects Factory in Marin, California, and 'filming' is largely the creation of computer generated imagery.

Even though there are few precedence relationships constraining you as you construct a filming schedule, there are other issues you must worry about. While you are not obligated to complete the Native Sun filming tasks in any particular order, many of these tasks cannot be scheduled simultaneously because of shared resources. In Native Sun, there are three types of resources that tasks may compete for: sets, locations and talent. For example, each of the 73 tasks in this project requires either a particular movie set or a particular movie location. While you might film in two different locations at once, you cannot film two or more scenes at the same location simultaneously. This forces you to choose a sequence in which to film tasks that require the same resource, even though there aren't any strict precedence relationships among these tasks and thus you may choose which-tasks-go-where in the sequence. Likewise, each of the 53 filming tasks has a talent requirement. As a scheduler, you must make sure that the Director, Assistant Director, and six cast members are never required to work on two or more tasks at the same time. Hundreds of other people are involved in this work, but you can assume that these people will work out a detailed staffing schedule to support your rough-cut filming schedule. Thus, you only need to avoid scheduling conflicts for the eight people summarized in Table 4. Ironically, three of these eight "people" aren't individual people- Hern, Tana, and Kim are actually teams of people manipulating large anima-tonic puppets to represent the twelve-foot tall creatures called akatatars. Film footage featuring Hern, Tana, and Kim will later be digitally re-touched to further add realism, but this does not concern you as the film production scheduler. For practical purposes, you can treat the scheduling of the characters Hern, Tana, and Kim just as you would the Director, Assistant Director, and the actors portraying the central human characters Mat, Jay,

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and Christine. Like anyone else, these twelve-foot tall puppets and their crews can only be one place at a