How to make a blocking diagram

What it is for

Blocking on paper answers questions that are expensive to answer on the day. Does the cross put an actor between the key and the other actor's face? Does the camera have to move, or can a wider lens hold both marks? Is there a light in shot once the camera pans left?

You are not choreographing. You are checking that the geometry works before twenty people are standing in the room waiting for you to find out that it does not.

What goes on it

• The room, to scale. Same as any plan. Movement is meaningless without distance.
• The camera, with its coverage. The whole point is what is in frame at each moment.
• Each actor, in a colour of their own. Two actors in the same colour on a page of marks is unreadable.
• Numbered positions. Position 1 is where they start. 2 is the next mark. Numbers, not arrows alone: the crew calls them out ("Sarah, that's your two").
• A path between marks. A dashed line with a direction arrow. It shows the route, and whether the route crosses in front of a light.
• Facing. Which way they are turned at each mark. An actor can be in the right place facing the wrong way and the shot is still wrong.

Keeping it readable

Draw the first position solid, the rest faint

If every mark is drawn at full strength the page turns to noise. The convention that works: position 1 is the actor, drawn normally; later positions are ghosts of the same shape, drawn faint, joined by a dashed path. Your eye follows the sequence without being told to.

One diagram per beat, not per scene

A four-page scene with a walk-and-talk does not fit on one plan. Split it where the camera setup changes, that is the natural unit anyway, because it is how you will shoot it. Two clear pages beat one clever one.

Keep it to about five marks

Past five or so positions on one drawing, nobody reads any of them. If a character genuinely has eight marks, that is two diagrams, or the sign of a scene that wants a moving camera rather than a moving actor.

Leave the lights on the page

The reason to draw blocking on the same floor plan as the lighting, rather than on a clean sheet, is that the two constrain each other. An actor's cross through the key is only visible when both are on the same drawing. Drawing the lighting plot first makes the blocking pass much faster.

A worked pass

Take the kitchen from the sample plan: Maya and Joel, a camera on a 35 mm at the door end, and a 3200K key from the front left.

1. Mark 1. Both actors as drawn, Maya by the counter, Joel at the table. Check: both inside the cone, neither shadowing the other.
2. Mark 2. Maya crosses toward the table. Draw the ghost, draw the dashed path; and bow it, so she goes round the table rather than through it. Now look: the path crosses the key's throw, so she wipes light across Joel on the way. That might be exactly what you want, or a disaster; either way you know before the day.
3. Mark 3. Joel moves once and turns on the spot to follow her. Rotate the ghost so the facing is right, and check the 35 mm still holds both. If it does not, either the camera moves or the lens goes wider; and you have found that out at a desk, for free.

Who reads it

The 1st AD, so they can schedule the setups. The gaffer, to see whether a unit needs to be flown rather than stood where an actor now walks. The camera operator, for the move. Print it with the lighting plot, not separately; one page that answers all three questions gets read; three pages get left in the van.

Next

Free templates: when they are enough, an honest look at the printed-grid-and-pencil approach.