We just completed shooting pickups for my film this past weekend.
Pickups/reshoots are a pretty common practice. You basically shoot your film, cut it together, and then go back and shoot anything that’s missing or that didn’t quite work out the first time. The trouble is, reshoots can be difficult and expensive. You have to get everyone back together again. You have to dress locations again. Your actors may not be available, or may have died their hair, or gone through puberty, or who knows what else. Plus, production is already a stressful and expensive venture. It’s extremely difficult to get the motivation back up again to do reshoots. The whole time I was planning them, I kept kicking myself for needing them in the first place.
When I originally planned production for the film, I divided the shoot into two parts. I scheduled all of the stuff involving principal locations and actors for a six day shoot in December. Everything else, I put off for pickups. Although it was difficult to get motivated, in the end, it worked out great. Most of the pickup stuff consisted of zombie action. And as it turned out, the stuff we actually needed was nothing like the stuff we initially wrote into the script. So if I had shot all of that zombie action stuff in the original 6 days, I would have killed the schedule getting a bunch of stuff that we didn’t actually need. By putting it off for the reshoots, we were able to edit the main drama of the film, look at it, and only go back and shoot the minimal zombie stuff that we actually need to make the film work.
If possible, I think I will always plan my shoots like this moving forward. If a script ever calls for action or 2nd unit stuff that doesn’t require the principal actors or locations, I’ll just put it off for pickups. That way I only have to shoot what I’ll actually use in the cut. There’s no point in shooting a bunch of expensive, effects-heavy action and having it end up in the trash.