Eights of a Page Explained
1/8, 2/8, 3/8, 4/8, 5/8, 6/8, 7/8, 1 page, 1 1/8 pages, 1 2/8 pages, 1 3/8 pages, etc…
If you’re not familiar with performing a script breakdown, hearing how long a scene is by the number of 8ths it runs can be really confusing. Film scheduling goes like this:
1 script page roughly equals one minute of screen time. This obviously varies when there’s stunts, special effects, car explosions, or really heavily emotional/physically draining on the cast content.
Script pages are typically 8 inches long (I feel bad for you if they’re not…). Each inch of a page is 1/8th of a page. To determine the length of a scene, the scene in the script is measured out by how many inches of the page it takes up. A scene that is 5/8ths would be 5 inches out of 1 full script page. In screen time, that would be just over half a minute.
We use this method for scheduling film productions. A typical indie film day would be around 5 pages. But if your 8ths that day contain stunts, sex, special effects, animals, children, company moves, or large groups of people and massive amounts of choreography, you’ll be looking at only wanting to shoot more like 2 pages. 2 5/8ths pages without those things for one day of shooting is a very nice luxury in the indie feature scene.
Some people physically use a ruler to determine 8ths of a page. At this point in my career, I’m pretty damned good at eyeballing it. But then there are some who say it’s more accurate to break it down by 16ths. Well, yes, but now you’re just going to confuse the script supervisor. And you don’t want to do that. In fact, checking in with your script supervisor at the very beginning or even during pre-pro to see how they measured the script is really important in keeping everyone on the same page for run times. When it comes to script/scene measuring, your scripty is your best friend :)
