The Production Guide
Script To Screen: Force Of Life
by Martin Willey

Script To Screen

• Script: Hook
• Script: Puddles
• Script: Scan
• Call Sheet: NGA3
• Call Sheet: Burnt
• Call sheet: running
• Progress Report

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While assistant director Ken Baker created the call sheet in advance of each day's filming, production manager Ron Fry wrote a progress report after each day describing exactly what they did.

This is the progress report for Thursday 4th July 1974, the same day as the call sheet 13, during filming of Force Of Life.

From this report, we know that they completed all their shots in Main Mission and Koenig's office, and the stand-by corridor set was filmed. We also know they completed an additional shot, all without using any of the planned evening filming.

Note the episode was estimated to take 10 days to film. This was the standard schedule, which they never managed to do for any episode in the first series. Most took 11 or 12 days. Force Of Life, at 13 ½ days, is one of longer overruns.

The time section shows the start and end times (8:30am to 5:20pm, with a one hour lunch break). As the final remarks note, the anticipated overtime was cancelled.

The script scenes shows that they did 10 script scenes, which would fill about 3 minutes 31 seconds of screen time. The complete episode had 92 scenes and would last 46 minutes, 51 seconds (excluding opening titles and closing credits). There were still 16 scenes and 5 minutes of screen time to fill, but much of that was actually special effects.

Two empty sections are action props and effects and stills. The first section would include things like fire, smoke, mist and explosions, none of which were needed on this day. The second section shows that, unusually, no publicity photos were taken for the entire episode. The only publicity photos for this episode are taken from film frames.

The picture, film footages, sound shows how much 35mm film and ¼ inch magnetic sound tape was used. The 35mm film is measured in feet (the metric 35mm measurement came from the Lumiere brothers and the early French film industry, although the format was invented in the US by Dickson and Edison and standardised by Eastman Kodak using fractions of an inch). There are 16 frames per foot, 90 feet per minute. Film is expensive, so wasted film is identified (this refers to technical problems, such as bad focus or lighting, rather than poor acting or set problems).

Short ends are unexposed film left at the end of a reel. It may be insufficient length for the next take, or they simply want to load a new reel in advance rather than waste time reloading between takes. The waste film is then sold on.

The final sections are for contract artistes, the actors who had contracts for the series or episode, and crowds, normally non-speaking extras who were paid by the day.

The contract artistes are listed with their call (expected) and arrival times (on this day, they all arrived on time), and when they were dismissed (most of the cast went home at lunch time).

The crowds includes the two stand-ins (from the call sheet we know these are Alan Meacham and Ron Watkins), as well as Quentin Pierre. We can also see their daily pay rates.

In 1974 the average weekly salary, before tax, was £38 for men, and only £20 for women (there were no equal pay rights at the time; the UK Equal Pay Act of 1970 came into effect at the end of December 1975). A stand-in or crowd actor earning £9.98 a day was slightly better than average. They were only paid when the production needed them, which was not every day. A hairdresser earning £20.78, was earning double the average male salary. Other jobs that appear in progress reports include a script secretary who earned £26.25 and an editor who earned £100.

Progress Reports also included additional travel requirements, including delivering a script to Julian Glover and Isla Blair on 1st July (for the next episode, Alpha Child; mention of Isla Blair suggests she was either cast or being considered for the role of Rena in that episode). The unit car was also delivering letters and cheques to ATV on 3rd July, and taking composer Barry Gray from Pinewood Studios to Heathrow Airport on the 5th (he had recorded the music for Another Time, Another Place on 25th June, and was returning to his home on the island of Guernsey).