Limited cast and a more compressed shooting schedule is something I desperately wish we had focused on more. Our shooting schedule has us shooting for 23 days when I'd be much much happier with 15. But. I think we wrote too big and our line producer has brought herself to the brink of death trying to cram it into less than 23 days but it wouldn't work.

So. Yeah, reiterating my thoughts from the comments on my first column: your sentences are expensive. A little too late for us to change it now, but for anyone in the process here, definitely pay attention to what Mr. Martell is saying here. Any way to cut down on scenes with a ton of characters, EXT scenes with a ton of characters, EXT scenes at night...that all translates to less shooting days which translates to less money needed on feeding a bloated shooting schedule which makes everything better.

And speaking of REC, you wouldn't happen to know the budget they worked with, do you? That's one of my favorite recent horror/thriller movies of the past 10 years probably. Fantastic movie and an extremely smart script that worked with--what I imagine was--limited resources. One central location, a limited cast of characters, one camera and a 80 minute run time. And the result is more entertaining than just about 90 percent of the movies that came out that year with budgets 70 times the size.