TIME: THE MOST EXPENSIVE LINE ITEM IN YOUR BUDGET
Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash
TIME
Where productions really lose time - and how to protect it and your budget
There are a number of sayings related to using time wisely:
"A Stitch in time saves nine." - A traditional proverb in which fixing a small problem immediately prevents a massive, time-consuming repair later.
"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."
Abraham Lincoln on how preparation makes the actual work faster and much easier.
"By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail." - Benjamin Franklin on how skipping the setup phase ensures future chaos and lost hours.
"The best time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining." - John F Kennedy on the wisdom of doing something now rather than delaying.
All of these point to the proper use of time in the doing of a task. When it comes to a film, tv or theatre project, time becomes the most expensive line item, because if you have not prepared properly, it will destroy your budget and your production.
Let’s dive deeper into what wisdom this has for our projects contrasting two different films Godzilla Minus One and Justice League.
In an ideal world a project will come in exactly as budgeted, but humans are not predictable and complications arise. This is the point where an actor (or any other creative) should realise that diva behaviour that costs the production time and money, leads to less likelihood that you will be called back. Because it directly impacts the financial health of a project.
The single most important ingredient that saves time and money is being prepared. Like the quotes above, if you have pre-produced properly with a final script that has been worked out, VFX requirements truly understood, cast and crew aligned and ready then you are less likely to come up against the extra time and cost that poor preparation brings. The idea of working it out as you go, is anathema to being on time and on budget. It may have worked for Gladiator, but outliers don’t create the rule.
Godzilla Minus One is a great example of how proper preparation before cameras rolled led to coming in on time and on budget and a critically and commercially successful film. It is a perfect case study in front-loading work so that shooting days become about execution, and not fire fighting in a high pressure situation.
The director, Takashi Yamazaki, was also the writer and VFX supervisor. This brought a unified and coherent vision, instead of filmmaking by committee. Takashi knew exactly what he needed from the VFX as he was writing and shooting. There was no “we’ll fix it in post”. This eliminated the need for extra shoot days to fix something that wasn’t working. There was no gap between what the director imagined and what the VFX team built as he did all storyboards and previs before shooting.
On set, it meant they weren’t figuring out a scene on the fly, they were capturing what had already been designed. A similar US project was The Creator (the director also had a VFX background). There was no wasted shoot time, trying to cover for unclear intent. This is key - when you invest time in prep (4 hours out of 6 sharpening the axe before chopping the tree down) then the “decision cost” is paid early, not on set, when it becomes expensive.
Godzilla Minus One is an example of what happens when instead of cutting prep and the cost it involves, they saved money by doing the thinking early. Every hour spend in proper prep saved multiple hours on set and in post that would have otherwise been required fixing the problems that arose from poor prep.
And the result? The film looks like it had a much bigger production budget, but was made for US $15m. And it’s box office? US$114m. A 7.6 multiple. When it comes to returns that is phenomenal. A 2 - 2.5 multiple is usually enough to break even and a multiple of 3+ is called a hit or a blockbuster. This is an example of a proper preparation, a ready to shoot production and a well executed plan.
Compare this to the chaotic production on Justice League. After the poor reception to Batman v Superman (2016) Warners ordered changes to a script and prep that was ready to shoot. The script, which was darker in tone was required to become lighter. This delayed the start of filming by two months, which cost a lot of money given the talent and crew attached. During production and post the studio kept pushing for a brighter and quippier tone and a cut down run time. This added time and money to the budget. When Snyder showed his cut to executives, they didn’t sign off because it was too dark. The studio decided to do further rewrites and reshoots. The budget started to balloon with the extra cost. Had they taken more time to work on the final script and lock it at the start this would have been mitigated.
When Snyder withdrew from the project, Joss Whedon stepped in and 55 days of reshoots and 80 new pages were added. Almost an entire feature was to be shot again. It substantially changed Superman’s footage, resulting in the infamous Henry Cavill footage where they had to CGI out his moustache that he had while filming Mission Impossible: Fallout (producers on fallout offered an alternative but ultimately would not allow him to shave his moustache without compensation to their filming schedule - time costs money). www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJZXcWZntEk
Justice League (2017) is the clearest superhero example of a production that began principal photography without a finished, stable script and then spiralled into costly delays and reshoots. This wasn’t primarily a case of a director chasing a new vision mid‑shoot, rather it was a franchise under pressure, with a script and plan not locked before green‑lighting principal photography. This caused on‑set rewrites, schedule slippage, and very expensive corrective filming. Time again becomes the most expensive line item if proper preparation is not involved.
Prepared films like Godzilla Minus One mean shooting days are about capturing a plan because time has been invested in a ready script, boards, previs, research and technical design. Unprepared films or films that switch tone and direction during a shoot like Justice League, shoot first and figure it out later leading to more coverage, more reshoots more “we’ll fix it in post” and more time and money burned. Like the quotes at the start of this article, time and care in prep saves mountains of time and money in shoot and post. Rather than rush, take more time to be ready to shoot. It’s worth it.
BOOK OF THE MONTH
THE CREATIVE CURVE
- ALLEN GANNETT
Breakthroughs are usually built, not stumbled upon.
Building on this month's learning around "Time as the Most Expensive Line Item," it's just as important to consider how time applies to a creative career.
There is an idea that people just have it or they don’t and that luck is the sauce that got people to where they are i.e. "If only I had good luck, I would be where I want to be."
The creative Curve by Allen Gannett demystifies creative success with case studies and data. His core thesis is that breakthroughs and careers are primarily built, rather than stumbled upon from the luck that may happen to fall down from heaven.
He argues that “creativity” is not a mystical gift, but a repeatable system for developing the right idea at the right time - specifically ideas that are in the golden zone of familiarity and novelty on a bell shaped creative curve. This links to what we spoke about above in time being the most expensive line item on a production budget: as labour (cast and crew) consume 50-60% of costs, every extra unplanned day burns cash. The same could be said in a creative career. We can all remember the audition or interview for a crew position or producer role that we were not prepared for.
Combining Gannett's framework with time as the most expensive line item suggests that the more we can front-load creative work before hitting principal photography or opening night, the less we we will eventually pay to work out the idea under the pressure of time and budget.
Gannett has 4 laws that are behind repeatable behaviours and “genius”, “innate talent” etc:
Consumption
Deep structured immersion in your field to internalise patterns of what’s worked. This is similar to the concept of 10, 000 hours to mastery. Concentrated time and effort on a skill breeds mastery of it.
Imitation
Deliberately follow the masters to learn from them the constraints and forms. Once you get to 10, 000 hours and beyond, you can then shift the patterns to create a new way of looking at things. Then you may become Kathryn Bigelow or Roger Deakins, or Daniel Day Lewis.
Creative Communities
Build a small support network to accelerate learning, feedback and distribution. This is exactly the idea behind the Modern Rituals community. Experienced peers and mentors (like Celine Rattray) that lead to exponential growth within the members of the community.
Iterations
Using feedback from audiences and data to refine ideas through multiple iterations until they land in the sweet spot - this is between familiarity and novelty. An audience is bored of the same familiar tropes, but also might be pushed away from something completely new in storytelling terms.
Applying Gannett’s insights into production and creative careers is important. How do we link his model to time and costs on a production?
Move creative risk earlier, when time is cheap
Time is more expensive when you are shooting and in post. It’s relatively cheap when in pre-production and script development. Use that cheaper time to get to a point where all the problems have been worked out. This means you are doing the “creative discovery” work before you need the idea to perform at scale.
Consumption and imitation
With the proper development process of reading comparable scripts, breaking down hits, reverse engineering structures and constant development and iteration of the script you will reduce the likelihood of wasted shooting days trying to figure out tone, structure or character logic.
Community
Having a built in community of fans and collaborators like trusted readers, dramaturgs, creative producers and collaborators gives you fast, high-quality feedback in the writing / workshop phase instead of when it becomes most costly on set or in tech.
Iteration
Use table reads, development workshops, staged readings, proof of concepts, sizzle reels to test the material and see what works and what doesn’t. This approach was used by Modern Rituals member Olly Ginelli to test his short The Long Spring which went on to Premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film festival in 2026, win the best short award at 3 festivals including the Kingston International Film Festival and is now eligible for BAFTA nomination entry. All from developing and iterating the material in workshops over the course of a year (our On Screen Magic lab to be precise). This then makes production smoother and more cost effective.
Thinking in these terms can make a 5-20k development lab save 50-200k in avoided reshoots, script changes on set or delayed openings.
2. The creative curve as a scheduling tool
Gannett’s curve can help as a market timing model. If the concept is too novel for current audiences, you may need extra marketing spend or ad time to educate viewers. Both are costly.
If you are late to a trend (think most of the superhero pics in the past few years) there is a risk of poor reception despite high budgets. For producers this means that you must track comparable releases and audience exposer to gauge timing of release of your project. This includes when to green light and your release window.
3. Iteration under Time Pressure is exponentially expensive
This point is the core idea of this monthly blog post. When you iterate before production you spend extra money. But that is far cheaper than iterating during production where rewrites on set, coverage for safety, extra unplanned VFX shots etc become brutally more expensive.
It is far easier to lock story, tone and key beats before day 1 of production. This allows you to get to the right version before the clock is ticking loudly and expensively. On set changes should be a last resort. The more that we can resolve creativity in rooms where time is cheap, the less that will be paid in rooms where time is the most expensive line item.
Watch an interview with Allen Gannett where he talks in detail about many of these concepts:
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