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March 11[edit]

How much usable film do they shoot per day?[edit]

The article Passport to Pimlico (regarding the 1949 film) says, "An average of ten takes a day were taken, in an attempt to get two and a half minutes of usable film per day. ... By comparison, commercial filming practice in 2015 was to take an average of 40 takes a day with 10 seconds a day of usable film recorded." The latter claim is cited to Robert Sellers' book The Secret Life of Ealing Studios. While the book may indeed make that claim, I can't see how it could be correct. There are plenty of contemporary movies which are 2 hours longer or longer, and if only 10 seconds of usable film were shot per day, it would take 720 days of filming to shoot a 120-minute film. And I know it doesn't take that long to film a major movie. --Metropolitan90 (talk) 05:39, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The cited source has, "Today in the commercial world one might get ten seconds in the can if one was lucky."^[1] Perhaps this refers to the shooting of television commercials, shown in the "commercial break", which rarely last for longer than 30 seconds. One data point: principal photography for the film Amadeus took 171 days for a running time of the final cut of 161 minutes. --Lambiam 08:57, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]