So...is there an unspoken rule on time consumption? I am a musician and have written and recorded songs. There was always the "rule of thumb" in production that said, " three hours of work for every minute of song.

The movie I have submitted in the competition is 6 minutes long. That production, from start to final edit took about 36 hours (that doesn't count scene experimentation and set preparation). So in this case, for every minute of movie, I spent 6 hours.

I would like opinions on time consumption. How long did your last movie take you to make? Setting aside personal satisfaction, was it's reception by the community, by in large, worth the work?
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I know some people get artsy fartsy and say, "I don't care if the public blah blah blah....BALONEY...of corse we care about how it's received.

For a 6 minute movie I would say 36 hours is pretty good, mine took much longer but it was one of my first and I didn't exactly optimize my time spent making it.
Over all though it took me about 8 weeks to complete it. I'm not sure how many man hours exactly but I would say that the first 3 weeks were the most diligent of the time spent. After that I had a 6 minute rough draft completed. I didn't work on it for about two weeks after that, I just watched it and thought of spots that needed to be edited and replaced. And then the final three weeks were fine tuning.
I will say that much of my time spent was filming shots that were never used, over all I had just over 100Gb of video filmed with Fraps at 1/2 size. I suspect that size will be turned in half for my next production with improved filming techniques.

I look forward to the responses in this thread, from the experienced Movie-makers who have produced some of the very best, the classic, IL2 movies.

Though I never produced a truly worthy movie I have, at times, worked on one or two efforts (individually and as a 'team member). I know therefore that it takes a HUGE amount of time to produce even the simplest of scenes or sequences.

From previous discussions on this subject, and personal experience, my judgment/estimate has been that to produce a Good 15 minute IL2 movie, with say two fully committed individuals involved, each placing the movie project as his Primary/Sole 'hobby-activity', should take about 3 months to complete.

So....3 months equals 12 weeks. Let's say an average of 4 days/evenings per week at 3 hours per 'session' would come to a total of 140+ hours...for One individual. Increase that by say 50% for the "co-producer/teammember" for a total of 200+ hours of effort. The result is a very rough guesstimate of 13 Hours per each minute of Movie time.....which is, obviously, my theoretical 'guess' rather than an empirically derived calculation.

Again, I look forward to the Experts' replies.

There's no unspoken rule of thumb I've heard of. All I do know is that you can pump out some good movies in a very short time, and some good movies take a very long time.

I depends what 'good' means.

I would also say, that to cross that thin line from good to great, although it may appear a small line, it is a huge difference in production time.

Sorry, Lazarus, I couldn't be more specific but I've never actually counted the hours I've put in.

Waiting for renders to finish is in my case a frustrating time waster. Although you can do other work in parallel, I found that rendering suck up most CPU energy and your parallel work gets bogged down. With my set-up to play the movie within the movie studio unrendered is sticky and just give you a glimpse of the real effects. So I think if you have a monster powerhouse machine where all these software runs fast then you can also save a lot of time.

Like the replies above, I can add that if you play around with new and foreign techniques, then it can take an enormous amount of time to establish your new methods, after that and with the experience, you can do the same in a fraction of the initial time.

A Rough estimate in my opinion of time consumption would be more in the region of 8-17 hours of fun to produce a minute of film footage.