Diminishing Weekends: the Clause That Shouldn't Become the Norm

Diminishing weekends and the suchlike

I was planning to write about all the wonderful new gadgetry which is available to us as filmmakers these days. Drones, Ozmos, widgets and gidgets and all sorts of clever light-weight gizmos to add dimension to what we shoot. (And what about the opening techno-crane sequence of La La Land?!)

But instead I’m going to have another grumble, this time about shortened weekend turnaround. 24 plus 10 = 34 hours, and that is not a weekend. It’s been suggested that if the shoot does go late on a Friday night then the crew could have an extended weekend including the following Monday.

Then the shooting week would be Tuesday to Saturday with one day off, 34 hours, the following Sunday to bring the shoot back onto a Monday-to-Friday schedule. Sounds to me like two thoroughly messed up weekends, and if that began to happen on a regular basis everyone is going to get pretty bloody sick of it pretty bloody quickly.

It seems this sort of clause has been in some ‘off-shore’ job contracts for some time, going back to the Narnia shoot even. But the shortened weekend clause hasn’t often been made use of so we’ve tended to let it slip through. Now it seems to be becoming accepted practice for off-shore projects coming here to write such clauses into contracts as if this were accepted ‘standard practice’. It’s not accepted ‘standard practice’ and should not be allowed to become so.

I know there are times when our Blue Book conditions need to be compromised to suit certain anomalies on a shoot, but let’s keep those alterations for special occasions. And let’s make sure that, if such clauses are to be included in a contract, it is acknowledged that this is outside Blue Book standard practice and that such anomalies do not set a precedent.

Of course we want productions from off-shore to come here to shoot, but I for one would like them to respect the way we work here in Aotearoa and to consider carefully and discuss any alterations they might like to make to our standard working weeks.

As I mentioned in the previous issue of this magazine, off-shore productions are getting considerable financial assistance, by way of the large budget production grant scheme, to encourage them to come to our shores. Great, but why aren’t we also clearly laying out our working terms and conditions before they start taking us for granted?

I wish I could get my head around these shortened turnaround arrangements.

It seems the production which is currently including a shortened weekend clause in their contract is working hard to try and mitigate the effects of this clause, which just makes me wonder why it’s even necessary to have it in there.

Is it because these off-shore productions are often dealing with SAG actors who are likely to have a deal which includes 12-hour turnaround, door to door? Does this have the effect of pushing the days as the week goes on so that by the time the end of the week comes along there has been slippage which means a late finish, but the production doesn’t want that to carry over into a late start at the beginning of the next shoot week?

One of the basics of series television is to write scripts which fit within the production schedule, so I’m suspicious of the reasoning which says these shortened or disrupted weekends are necessary to accommodate turnaround from nights back to days. I’ll become especially suspicious if these disrupted weekends are to be imposed on crew on a regular basis.

And why have crew allowed this to go ahead?

I can understand that outsiders coming here to work on a project, miles from home, would be quite happy to work odd hours. But we now have a mature industry which means mature crew, which often means they have families and lives outside of their work in the film biz. So they, not surprisingly, want their weekends to themselves and their families; especially on a long-form production or series.

I know that many of the crew on this current production are wary of what I will call the ‘disrupted weekends’ clause, and I’m sure the Kiwi office staff and ADs will be doing their darndest to keep such disruption to a minimum.

But let’s make sure in future, if such renegade clauses are going to find their way into crew contracts, that they are acknowledged as being outside normal practice and will only be used occasionally when absolutely necessary to pull a shoot back onto days after a stretch of night shooting.

Broken turnaround is broken turnaround and crew should be recompensed accordingly.

​