Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2022 March 11

= March 11 =

How much usable film do they shoot per day?
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)
 * The cited source has, "Today in the commercial world one might get ten seconds in the can if one was lucky." 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)