Film Production

Welcome to Free Film Production course for Beginners from Courses Buddy!

Well, for the next few topics, I’ll be leading you through the Film Production course.

Filmmakers do great things and some not great things with cameras, lights, microphones, actors, makeup, costumes and special effects. They put together all these puzzle pieces to perform an amazing trick and communicate ideas and emotions on a two-dimensional screen.

They make us laugh, cry, squeal, cover our eyes and every movie starts very simply: starts with an idea. Maybe it’s a grand vision of an intergalactic war or a small and tender tale about a woman trekking across the country with her dog. Either way both these ideas go through many transformations before they arrive in a movie theater on Netflix or on Blu-Ray.

But how?

How do you take an idea and turn it into something that you can show people and how do you get people interested in helping you make it? How do you cast it, crew it, edit it, and release it? Are you going to direct it and what does the director actually do? What are producers anyway? Do you even need one?

Actually let’s get this one out of the way right now.

Yes!

Producers are very necessary and like how much does this all gonna cost? Do you need two hundred million dollars to bring your idea to life or do you need two thousand?

With this free course on film production we hope to demystify a lot of these questions and help everyone understand just how much goes into making a movie.

Because working on films is fun and exciting!!!

But it’s also a lot of very focused work that can turn into chaos if you’re not prepared or paying attention.

So join me, for the next 15 topics of Film Production with Courses Buddy.

If you want to make a movie, generally you’re going to want to start with a script.

In this topic, we are going to talk about the basics of screenplays and how to get started thinking about and actually writing your movie.

We’ll talk about all those jobs that are listed in the credits, and how movies take

a huge amount of collaboration, whether you have a crew of tens or thousands. We’ll go behind the scenes to see how movies are planned, shot, and edited, and take a peek at all the equipment involved.

And we’ll learn how films are marketed and distributed, whether they go to movie theaters or straight into your home. But, before we get anywhere near lights, camera, action… we need to start with a road map that gives everyone in the cast and crew the directions they need to make a film.

It’s time to talk about the screenplay.

We’ll be learning about how the vast majority of narrative fiction films get made. And to do that, we need to start with the screenplay.

A screenplay is a written version of a movie. Think of it as a blueprint. It’s not the final product; it’s a set of plans to guide a team of artists, craftspeople, and engineers as they produce a film.

Every screenplay is formatted with three basic elements: sluglines, action, and dialogue. Each new scene begins with a slug line. It’s written in all-capital letters and acts as a code to convey information to the crew.

A slug line might look something like this: INT. Here the INT stands for interior, meaning this scene takes place inside. If the scene takes place outside, the slug line would start with EXT. for exterior.

The second word tells us where the scene takes place, which is important information for a lot of the crew. The location scout needs to find somewhere to film the scene, the production designer alters the location to make it fit the world of the film, and the cinematographer decides how to light it.

Line Producer

But before any of that happens, the line producer uses the location to help figure out how much the film is going to cost. The same goes for the last word in the slug line, which describes when the scene takes place, usually either day or night.

Besides giving information to the crew, this can affect the cost of the movie, partially because shooting at night is more expensive.

After the slugline comes the action. These are short, assertive sentences that describe who’s in the scene and what they’re doing. Since you watch a movie unfold over time, the action is written in present tense.

So instead of writing: “Iron Man flew across the sky,” you’d write: “Iron Man flies across the sky.” The action is also limited to what the audience can see and hear. In a novel, you can describe what a character is thinking and feeling. Something like: “Luke Skywalker feels miserable.”

In the screenplay, you’d have to write an action to show us how he feels, like: “Luke Skywalker hangs his head and wipes away a tear.” There are a lot of guidelines and tricks to writing action lines, but the most important rule is: show, don’t tell.

Remember that this is where the thoughts, feelings, and themes of the screenplay are turned into actions you can see.

And the final piece of a screenplay is the dialogue. These are the words spoken by characters. Feature-length screenplays are usually between 90 and 120 pages. And each page typically becomes about a minute of the final film. This is more of an average than a hard rule, by the way.

Some dialogue-heavy pages will likely be shorter than a minute, while some pages with lots of action may end up longer once the film is shot and edited. Now, some stories are better suited to the screen than others.

Different media have different strengths, so what makes a good poem or graphic novel won’t necessarily make a good movie. A film creates an immersive visual world – that “illusion of reality” we keep talking about. And within that world, it can tell a story packed with complex ideas and emotions.

Movies tend to focus on three main things: a protagonist, which is the film’s main character; a goal or objective, which is something the protagonist wants; and obstacles, which is whatever’s standing between the protagonist and their goal.

Think about a heist movie. Maybe a master criminal wants to steal the world’s biggest diamond, but finds herself facing off against a rival thief. Or a romantic comedy, where an awkward-but-loveable introvert wants to date their outgoing neighbor, but is afraid to leave the comfort of his routine.

Protagonist. Goal. Obstacle.

These are the building blocks of a screen story, and it’s from these that everything else emerges, like setting, character, theme, and tone. Now, the protagonist doesn’t necessarily have to be the story’s hero.

Films are full of anti-heroes like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, or accidental villains like William H. Macy’s character in Fargo.

Usually, a movie’s protagonist will grow or change in some way in pursuit of their goal. The master criminal might learn humility as she attempts to steal the diamond. Or maybe the introvert overcomes his social anxiety to befriend his love interest. But the most important thing for the screenwriter is finding ways to make all of this come across visually.

One way to do that is by following what’s known as the “Hero’s Journey.” This is a template for character development that was popularized by the American mythologist Joseph Campbell. By looking at myths from cultures all over the world, Campbell identified twelve common steps taken by main characters as they transform over the course of a story.

These range from resisting the call to adventure and meeting their mentor, to facing their biggest fear and surviving a final ordeal, armed with everything they’ve learned along the way. The Hero’s Journey was famously used by George Lucas when writing Luke Skywalker’s journey from Tatooine farm kid to Jedi knight.

Some screenwriters love it, while others think it’s a stale, overused formula. But if you’re looking to write your first screenplay, it’s not a bad place to start. Once you have some characters and plot points, you need to throw some conflict in the mix.

Conflict moves a story forward, and helps us identify with the protagonist as they’re struggling against their obstacles. And screenplays can have different kinds of conflict.

External Conflict

External conflict occurs whenever the protagonist encounters physical obstacles.

Take the first Lord of the Rings film, The Fellowship of the Ring.

Our protagonist, Frodo, has a goal: to destroy the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom. No problem, right? Except, in order to get to Mount Doom, he has to travel across the known world, avoid an endless army of orcs and monsters, and outwit this powerful fiery eye that’s searching for him.

Not to mention, he’s the shortest guy in the movie and they make him walk barefoot the whole way. They don’t even give the poor guy shoes!

Internal Conflict

On the other hand, internal conflict is when the protagonist wrestles with some emotional or psychological obstacle. For Frodo, that could be his ignorance of the wider world, a lack of faith in himself, or even his jealousy and selfishness.

Usually, the more conflict the protagonist faces, the more they transform to overcome it. But that doesn’t mean that the fate of the world has to be at stake in every single screenplay.

The writer should scale the conflict to fit the kind of story they’re telling. Like, in Bridesmaids, Kristin Wiig’s character just wants to be a good maid of honor to her best friend. She faces a lot of external conflict, from a rival bridesmaid to some severely undercooked Brazilian food.

And internally, she feels conflicted about her best friend getting married, the loss of her bakery, and her self-worth. The universe isn’t going to implode if she doesn’t succeed, but we still empathize with her as she struggles to achieve her goal.

Three Act Structure

Now, once you have some ideas for the story you want to tell, how are you supposed to organize them all? Screenwriters often use something called Three Act Structure, which is based on theories by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle from more than 2,000 years ago.

The idea is simple: that every story has a beginning, middle, and end; and that certain kinds of events happen in each section. Act One sets up the world of the screenplay, introducing us to the characters, and identifying the protagonist and their goal.

In the Wizard of Oz, most of Act One takes place in Kansas. It’s the black-and-white part. We get external conflicts between Dorothy and that mean lady down the street, as well as Aunt Em. We also learn that Dorothy is unsatisfied with her life and dreams of something more exciting, somewhere over the rainbow.

Once she’s transported to Oz, she meets her antagonist, the Wicked Witch of the West, and we learn that her goal is to find the wizard so she can go home.

In Act Two, the protagonist faces increasingly difficult conflicts as they pursue their goal. They meet allies, encounter successes and setbacks, and are often brought to a point of hopelessness.

For Dorothy, this is when the wizard refuses to take her home unless she can defeat the Wicked Witch. To get what she wants, she’ll have to face her fears and do the seemingly-impossible.

Finally, Act Three contains the climax of the film. There’s usually some epic face-off between the protagonist and antagonist, the person who most directly opposes them. That confrontation usually decides whether or not the protagonist achieves their goal.

And in most Hollywood screenplays, they do. Dorothy gets back to Kansas. Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star. Simba defeats Scar and restores the circle of life to the Pride Lands. But the guidelines of the Three Act Structure are just that.

Foreign and independent movies can have more ambiguous endings, from the open-ended final shots of The Wrestler or Birdman, to the heartbreak of Brokeback Mountain or The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.

Films like MASH, Traffic, or Magnolia split their stories up among different protagonists, while movies like Pulp Fiction and Memento scramble time, telling their stories out of order. And films like Mulholland Drive, Rashomon, or Man with a Movie Camera seem to reject the Three Act Structure altogether.

Remember: screenplays are one part of a longer process; they’re a blueprint.

Whether they follow more traditional rules or invent their own, the clear, concise, visual language of a screenplay provides the foundation for all the work that is to come.

In this topic, we learned about the format of screenplays and why they look the way they do. We talked about the essential building blocks of a film story, and we broke down the traditional Three Act Structure: what happens when and why.

Next, we’ll talk about pitching and pre-production, as the cameras get ready to roll.

Mastering Pitching and Pre-Production in Film

So you want to make a movie!

Let’s say you’ve already written a screenplay you want to shoot, or found a story you’d like to adapt. Or maybe you just have an idea that you think would make a good film. What’s next?

There are a few steps you should take to sharpen your idea and get all the pieces into place to make production go as smoothly as possible. Most filmmakers go through this process one way or another, whether you’re making a big-time studio blockbuster or a no-budget indie with your friends.

It all begins with an awesome pitch.

Pitching

A pitch is a brief, verbal description of Pitching a project you’d like to make. It’s supposed to be persuasive: You’re trying to get people excited about your idea, usually because you need their help.

We pitch things all the time.

Kids try to persuade their parents to buy them a dog or a car. Employees make a case to get a promotion or a raise. And people try to convince their friends to see the new Superman movie. But in addition to getting people on board with your project, a pitch can be a great way to help you figure out if your story works in the first place.

Is the concept compelling?

Is the climax satisfying?

Do the characters feel real and three-dimensional?

By gauging someone’s response, you might decide to alter the plot, or re-think the entire film. And you can pitch an idea to just about anyone!

The late screenwriter, author, and educator Blake Snyder suggested telling your film idea to as many strangers as possible – bank tellers, Uber drivers, the person waiting in line behind you at the grocery store.

He believed that you’d get a more honest reaction by pitching your story to someone you don’t know. Your mom might love whatever you tell her. The woman sitting next to you on the plane? Not so much.

On the other hand, sometimes you might need a little encouragement. And even if your parents and friends don’t give you honest critical feedback, the act of telling your story out loud can help you understand it better.

A lot of filmmakers even pitch their movie ideas to themselves: in the shower, in the car, or pacing around a room while talking to their cat.

The bottom line is: stories get better the more you tell them.

You can identify the pieces that work and figure out weaknesses before you start producing anything.

Resources

On the practical side, a pitch can get you thinking about the resources you’ll need to bring your story to the screen, and help get your film made. Screenwriters might pitch an idea to a producer or a studio executive, in hopes that person will pay them to write the script.

Directors might pitch a project to a studio or an investor to raise money to shoot it. And filmmakers often pitch their movies to well-known actors, hoping to persuade them to star in the film.

Developing a pitch can also help you ballpark your film’s budget. Not just in terms of money, but also how much time it will take, how big a crew you’ll need, and what sort of special effects or extra equipment you’ll require.

So how do you craft a movie pitch? Well, there’s not a single formula, but there are a few ingredients that most good pitches have.

Pitch Formula

First of all, you should deliver your pitch with excitement and confidence. You want your passion for your movie to be infectious, and you want whoever’s listening to believe you can pull it off.

Second, you might compare your film to other successful movies that explore similar worlds or have similar tones. We call these comparisons, or comps for short.

Like, you might pitch The Martian as Cast Away on Mars. Or maybe The Edge of Tomorrow as Groundhog Day by way of Independence Day.

Comps aren’t meant to limit your story or make it seem like a copy of something else. The goal is to convey the scope, genre, and tone of your film.

Another thing most pitches include is a logline. This is a one-sentence summary of your movie that includes the genre, a description of the protagonist, and a concise outline of the plot.

The logline for Jaws, for instance, might go something like this: when a killer shark starts eating members of a tourist beach town, the new chief of police must overcome his fear of the water to save his community.

Next, your pitch should include some information about the characters and story. This isn’t a painstaking scene-by-scene description – just the main plot points, key character moments, and enough of the emotional arc to communicate why the story matters.

Some pitches can include visual aids: posters, photographs, or even pre-designed trailers. These work best when the film is set in another time or place, like fantasy or science-fiction movies that need a lot of world-building.

Your pitch could also suggest some casting ideas. Would Reese Witherspoon be great for your satirical comedy? Is your gritty noir perfect for a brooding Idris Elba type?

Even if you don’t expect to have A-list actors in your film, it can give your listener a clearer idea of what the movie will look and feel like.

Finally, the pitch should tell us who you think will watch the film. How big is the potential audience? What kind of resources will you need to market and distribute it? Is it a short film that you hope to screen at film festivals, or a blockbuster that will open in two thousand theaters?

Preparing a pitch that covers all these points can improve your chances of getting your movie made, while also making the story clearer and stronger.

Now, let’s say you’ve honed your pitch, written your script, and collected all the resources you need to make the film.

Pre-Production

Next, you have to get ready to shoot it. We call this part of the process pre-production. It’s the unglamorous work of making all the creative decisions and logistical plans you can before the cameras start to roll.

Depending on the size and scale of your film, there are hundreds or even thousands of choices to make.

During pre-production, you’ll cast your film.

Whether you’re convincing family and friends to act for you, or working with a casting director and watching audition tapes, you’ll need a person to play every character. That includes lead actors, supporting actors, and background actors to be extras – pedestrians on the street, diners at a restaurant, or fans at a baseball game.

You’ll also need to assemble your crew.

These are the artists, technicians, and craftspeople who will physically make the movie, from a cinematographer to oversee the camera department, to an assistant director to make sure you’re staying on schedule and on budget.

There are a ton of people that can be a part of the crew, and we’ll talk about all these roles in more detail in later topics.

And besides assembling a dream team of people, you’ll also need to establish the look of the film. You have to figure out things like the color scheme, the lighting plan, and when it takes place.

To tell your story, will you need unique props or costumes? Are there special effects involved, and how do you need to plan for those during the actual shoot? You’ll also need to find and secure all of your locations during pre-production – whether you need to build futuristic spaceship sets, or if you can just shoot in your mom’s basement.

And that’s only a fraction of the questions you should be considering: does your lead actor need a dialect coach to learn a Dutch accent? Do you need a stunt coordinator to plan your big action sequence? How many sandwiches will you need to order on day three to feed your cast and crew?

Pre-production can be an exhausting process, but also an exhilarating one.

Even though you haven’t shot a single frame yet, you’re already making your movie! And one of your biggest assets while making all these decisions is that screenplay you’ve polished to perfection. Either you or your line producer will do a breakdown of the script.

This is essentially a big list of every character, location, prop, costume, vehicle, and any special needs of your film. If you’re doing this on your own, a handy trick is to take a highlighter and mark every single noun in your script.

That way, you can make sure you’ve accounted for all the things you need to gather to make your film, no matter how incidental they may be. Once you have a breakdown, you can figure out the film’s shooting schedule, which details what scenes you’re going to film and when.

Like, let’s say you’re making a movie based on the board game Clue. Armed with the breakdown and shooting schedule, you’ll know things like: on day five, you’re going to be shooting Scene 14.

You should plan out when and where the cast and crew are expected to arrive on set, down to details like meal breaks and transportations times. You’ll need most of your leading actors: Colonel Mustard, Mrs. Peacock, Mrs. White, and Mr. Boddy.

You’ll need your actors to be fully costumed, and you’ll also need some props: a candlestick, a lead pipe, and a knife. You’ll need some fake blood too, because this is the scene where Mr. Boddy’s been stabbed. And it all takes place in the “Study” location, so that needs to be ready to go too.

Now, all this information will be compiled into a call sheet.

This is a document given to every member of the cast and crew before the next shooting day, so they have everything they need to get prepared to work. Call sheets also include a weather forecast for each location, times for sunrise and sunset, the addresses of nearby emergency services, and maps from the set to things like the hair and makeup trailer or the restrooms.

Finally, call sheets have contact information for nearly everybody in the crew.

This comprehensive document is a culmination of all the work of pre-production. Armed with it, you’re finally ready to get down to business and make your movie!

So, we talked about what goes into a movie pitch and who you might share it with. We learned the basic steps of pre-production, from assembling your crew to building your schedule, to best set you up to start making your film.

And in the next lesson, we’ll explore what the crew actually does once the cameras start rolling.

Making a film can seem… daunting.

After you have a screenplay and have done your pre-production, you still have to film the thing. And you’re gonna need help. Orson Welles once said, “A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.”

But he also co-wrote, produced, directed, and starred in Citizen Kane. So which is it? Do you need hundreds of people, or a couple of disciplined artists doing everything? Well, It depends on your movie. Every successful film production has the same kinds of jobs, but the scale can vary a lot.

Every story has different needs.

Maybe the best place to start sizing up the needs of your project is in the inner workings of a film set, where the actual filming takes place. And of course there are the people – the crew that work on and off set during principal photography, when most of the movie is being filmed.

Some people refer to different positions in a film crew as “above the line” or “below the line.” This idea is a holdover from the studio days, when budgets on paper had a literal line between different jobs.

The people “above the line,” like writers, directors, producers, and certain actors, negotiated payment before shooting began. And those “below the line” were paid a rate for every day they worked.

If we’re sticking with Orson Welles’ analogy, everyone “below the line” is a filmmaker’s army. The General of that army is the Unit Production Manager, or UPM. Usually, the director picks key creative roles to support the vision of the film, like the production designer and cinematographer.

But the UPM is responsible for hiring everyone else and managing all the moving parts of a production. They oversee pre-production, from picking locations to planning out the shooting schedule.

And sometimes they’re on set when a scene is being filmed. But not always. They might be checking in with the Art Department to make sure sets are ready for the next day’s shoot, or visiting the Production Office to work with someone like the production accountant, who makes sure everyone gets paid.

The UPM is also the point of contact for any local authorities and companies the production is working with.

Now, the person running a film set is the head of the Production Department: the 1st Assistant Director, or 1st AD. They work with the director to schedule the details of each day’s shoot and communicate what every department needs to do.

Also, they’re responsible for keeping everyone safe.

If you’ve ever visited a film set and saw someone you thought was the director, it was probably the 1st AD. They’re the ones “calling the roll” to tell people to do specific things at specific moments – shouting things like “roll sound,” “roll camera,” and sometimes even “Action!”

While the 1st AD is always on set, the 2nd Assistant Director, or 2nd AD, is usually at base camp, which is just off set. Base camp is the behind-the-scenes of the behind-the-scenes. It’s usually where the crew eats lunch, where the bathrooms are, and where the department and actor trailers are.

The 2nd AD is the main point of contact between the set and the actors when they’re not acting.

They make the daily call sheet, which is the document that tells everyone in the cast and crew where they need to be, when, and who they report to the next day. When a scene has extras, or background talent, the 2nd AD may go on set to work with these actors.

They also oversee the rest of the production hierarchy – any other ADs, and Production Assistants. We call them P.A.s. PAs are the lowest rung on this ladder, but they’re still super important.

There’s a pretty good chance that everyone on a set has been a PA at some point. Their main job is anticipating needs and communicating between departments, like by making sure everyone hears all the 1st AD’s calls.

So, the production team is the glue that holds the film set and all the crew together. And there are a bunch of departments.

Let’s start with the Camera Department. The person responsible for the look of the film is the Director of Photography, or DP, also called the cinematographer. They work with the director to translate the script into a shot list, which is a plan for how to visually convey every single scene. The 1st AD uses the shot list to plan the daily schedule.

On an independent film, the cinematographer might also be the camera operator. But, usually, the cinematographer directs the camera crew, which includes operators and camera assistants, or ACs. While ACs aren’t actually framing shots and operating the camera, the First AC helps focus the camera, so they’re sometimes known as the Focus Puller.

ACs also maintain equipment and keep camera notes for continuity. Cinematographers need to understand story, cameras, and lighting to pack a visual punch. So they work with the Gaffer, also known as the Chief Lighting Technician.

They’re the head of the Electric Department, and design and implement the lighting of each scene. The Gaffer’s second-in-command is called the Best Boy or Best Boy Electric – no matter their gender.

Both the titles “Gaffer” and “Best Boy” have been around since at least the 1930s, but it’s unclear how the names came to mean “head electricians.” On smaller crews, the Electric Department might be just a Gaffer and a Best Boy. But on larger crews, these two might organize dozens of electricians and lots of equipment. And you can’t talk about Electric without talking about the Grip Department.

These departments are close buddies, and are sometimes called G&E. While Electric oversees lighting and getting power to the set, Grip oversees all the rigging for lights. That includes all stands for lights as well as flags, silks, and nets, which are fabric used to control or block light.

Grip also handles specialized rigging for other departments too, like cranes, dollies, and dolly track, which help with specific camera movements. The Key Grip leads the team, and their number two is the Best Boy Grip, who carries out the Key Grip’s plans for rigging.

G&E ( Grip and Electric Departments) is often the largest department on set during filming. But the smallest department is only one person: the Script Supervisor, or “scripty,” who’s in charge of – you guessed it – the script.

They make sure the actors stay true to the writer’s dialogue. So if you ever hear an actor call “line,” they probably forgot what to say and are asking the Script Supervisor for help.

This department is also called Continuity because the “scripty” is responsible for thinking ahead to how the editor will cut everything together. To hear all the words being said, the script supervisor needs to work with the Sound Department.

The head is the Sound Recordist, or Sound Mixer, whose job is to hear everything. They’re usually just off-set, monitoring sound in a slightly quieter place. They manage the boom operator, who’s on set and trying to get the microphone as close as possible to the actors’ mouths without being in the shot.

Now, all the departments we’ve talked about so far are involved in capturing the film. But there are a bunch that work both on and off set to create the world that’s being captured. The Art Department, for instance, designs, builds, or transforms sets, finds and creates props, and dresses each location to match the director’s vision for each scene.

Their fearless leader is the Production Designer, who works with the director in pre-production to create the look of the world. Then, the Art Director organizes everyone else and makes the Production Designer’s plans real.

Everything in the mise-en-scène is found or made by the Art Department. So the more complex a film is, the larger the team tends to be.

Similarly, the Wardrobe Department is responsible for channeling the themes of the film, time period, setting, and character traits into the clothing of each character in each scene. Even if it looks like someone doesn’t have any costume changes, they probably have different versions of the same outfit – like a bloody shirt, or ripped pants – depending on what happens in the film.

The Costume Designer is responsible for pre-production planning.

While everything on set and in the wardrobe trailer is overseen by the Costume Supervisor. Set costumers dress and undress actors before and after shooting, paying close attention to continuity between scenes.

And to complement Wardrobe, there’s Hair and Makeup, or HMU, which tend to get lumped together as one department. Of all the crew, Wardrobe and HMU spend the most one-on-one time with actors, and play an important role in making them feel safe and confident while doing their work.

A film with a very small cast might have one person who does all the makeup and hair styling, while larger casts might have an HMU artist for each lead actor. Most makeup artists can make people look really good or bad or rough, depending on what a scene calls for.

And if a film needs a lot of specialized makeup, like scars for a war or full-on monster faces, then you call a Special Effects Makeup Artist. They’re the bridge between HMU and the Special Effects Department, which is led by the Special Effects Supervisor.

Special Effects is in charge of every on-set effect, from creating artificial snow or rain, to orchestrating a car crash or an epic explosion. Especially when we’re talking about special effects or stunts, which are cast and choreographed by the Stunt Coordinator.

Before potentially-dangerous scenes, the 1st AD will repeat all the general safety instructions on set. Then, either the Special Effects Supervisor or Stunt Coordinator will talk through what should happen, and what everyone should do if something goes wrong.

Most crews will have at least one trained Set Medic, like an EMT. Or a special team might be brought in, if a potentially dangerous scene is being filmed.

Now, we’ve talked about almost everyone you might find on a set. But where the set is changed throughout a film – thanks to the Locations Department.

In pre-production, the scout will search for places to film, based on the script and practicality. Once the director and producers approve of the locations, the department keys will go on a “tech scout” to make sure they can do their work, too.

What we see on-screen is actually just one small part of the location!

The location manager and location assistants plan where everything will go, from the set that will appear on camera to all the trailers in base camp. They’re first to arrive and last to leave.

The second people to arrive are usually drivers in the Transportation Department, which is overseen by the Transportation Manager. They get all the large equipment and trailers to the set, and shuttle cast and crew back and forth.

Obviously, the more people you have, the bigger the team you’ll need.

And, speaking of big teams, the one job that should never be forgotten, is actually two jobs. And it’s feeding all these people! Catering companies are contracted by the UPM to cook 1 to 3 meals per day. And the Craft Services Person is the crew member that manages a station of snacks and drinks on set. Both the person and station can be affectionately called “Crafty.”

During a difficult day of shooting, “Crafty” might be the only thing keeping you going. The power of a granola bar and a friendly face should never be underestimated!

Seriously, feed your cast and crew.

And make sure you’re paying attention to allergy and dietary restrictions. No one is doing that to be high maintenance. Crewing a film set is demanding work, but it’s work that attracts people who really love it.

Here, we discussed scalability and how the needs of a film dictate the size of a film crew. We learned about the different departments and jobs on a set and how they interact.

Well, next, we’ll start diving into these roles in more detail, starting with that piece of equipment at the center of every set: the camera.

Camera? Camera!!! Yes, camera.

Today, we are going to talk all about CAMERA.

A camera is a collection of parts that can help you tell a visual story. It takes in light through a lens and captures images, creating that illusion of reality we keep talking about.

You could even use your cell phone camera to make a movie!

But filmmakers usually have equipment that gives them a lot more control. So, let’s look through the eyes of a cinematographer, and see how they combine camera technology and the language of film to get that perfect shot.

Let’s start with the tool that focuses light into a camera: the camera lens.

Camera Lens

Some cameras have a lens that’s permanently attached, but others have a separate body with a lens mount, where you can swap out different lenses for more creative control.

For instance, low-budget filmmakers can rent great lenses for cost-effective cameras to improve their footage quality. Or they might use older lenses to make a period piece feel more authentic.

Focal Length

All lenses have either a fixed or variable focal length, which is the distance from the center of the lens to where the image is in focus. And focal length determines your field of view, which is how much you can see in frame. It’s usually measured in millimeters, and a 50mm lens is generally thought to be closest to how our eyes frame the world.

A fixed focal length lens can be called a prime lens. It tends to have higher quality glass because it’s specialized for just one focal length. On the other hand, a variable focal length lens is more versatile. It’s also called a zoom lens, because it can zoom in and out.

Aperture

Now, you can also control how much light gets into the camera body through a hole called the aperture. It works like the iris and pupil in your eye, becoming wider or narrower to let more or less light through the lens.

Aperture is measured in f-stops. That lowercase “f” stands for focal length, because it’s the ratio of the focal length compared to the diameter of the aperture.

An f/1.2 lens, for example, can open wider than an f/5.6. So when you “stop down” your aperture, you’re making that diameter of the opening smaller, letting less light in, and changing that ratio.

Shutter Speed

As you stop down, you’ll notice that the number is actually getting larger. And to control how long the film or sensor inside is exposed to light, you can adjust the camera’s shutter speed. You can think of a typical shutter as a door in the lens that opens and closes really quickly.

If you have an aperture that can open wider, like in a f/1.2 lens, you can let more light in, and have a faster shutter speed.

Usually your shutter speed is about double your frame rate. So if you’re shooting 24 frames per second, for instance, your shutter speed would be 1/50 seconds. But there’s one little problem with shutters that work like a door: they click. Which can get noisy.

Shutter Angle

So on some movie film cameras, you’ll have a shutter angle instead of a shutter speed. These shutters are rotary discs that spin, to control the amount of light that enters an opening into the camera. A smaller shutter angle works like a faster shutter speed: the image will be exposed more quickly, and it’ll look crisper!

With a larger shutter angle or slower shutter speed, the image will be smoother and have more blur from any motion. How light gets turned into an image depends on what kind of camera you’re using.

In a film camera, the light hits the chemical-coated film strip at an opening called the gate, which exposes it so it retains an image. In a digital camera, the light heads to an electronic sensor, which translates the light energy into a digital image.

The camera that’s filming me right now has what’s called a Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor, or CMOS, sensor.

Other digital cameras might have a Charged Coupled Device, or a CCD, which uses more power, but produces better images than earlier CMOS sensors.

ISO

Both film and digital sensors also have a property called ISO. The higher the ISO number, the more sensitive they are to light. The name comes from the International Standards Organization, which created the scale filmmakers use.

Generally, the lower your ISO in photography, the cleaner and richer your images will look. But, if you’re in a room without a lot of light, your image will be pretty dark. In this case, it’s tempting to just bump your ISO way up to like 1600, to increase sensitivity to available light.

You’ve got to be careful with that, though. Depending on the camera or film stock, raising the ISO to compensate for low light just brightens everything in frame, and can result in grainy, lower-quality footage. So, instead of raising your ISO, you might wanna add more light to the scene and open the aperture to allow as much of it in as possible.

Now, imagine you’ve put everything we’ve talked about to use. You’ve adjusted your lens, aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, and captured some beautiful footage. All that footage is stored on what’s called the media.

In a film camera, the media is the film itself. As long as you don’t lose or ruin it, you’ll always have what you shot.

In a digital camera, the media is a data storage device like tape, drives, or cards. And you’ll have to decide on a codec.

“Codec” is a portmanteau of “coder” and “decoder.” Because that’s what it does. It’s a program that can compress what the camera has shot onto your storage device, and then decompress that footage when you need to work with it in post-production.

Basically, it’s like a little package of digital information. You might recognize a codec like H.264. Or mp3! Shooting in raw means the images don’t get packaged or processed. You get higher quality footage, but you need a bunch of storage because those image files get huge.

Now, understanding how a camera works is only part of a filmmaker’s job. Film sets have an entire team of talented artists working to create the visual story of a movie.

The Director of Photography, or cinematographer, is the head of the camera department. They create the shot list with the director, to plan how everything in the screenplay will be captured visually. The camera operator is the person who actually controls the camera and frames the shots.

Sometimes you need a static shot, so the camera operator uses a tripod. The cool kids call this a camera “on sticks.” Or, sometimes you want a moving shot, so the operator uses a handheld camera, or attaches one to a mechanical cart called a dolly.

There’s also a device called a steadicam, which makes a shot smoother than handheld, but not as smooth as a dolly.

Now, the person who manages all this equipment and sets up the camera is the First Assistant Camera, or 1st AC. They work under the main camera operator. Sometimes, you’ll hear this job referred to as Focus Puller because the 1st AC controls the camera lens to focus on the actors as they move through the scene.

It might sound simple, but for decades focus pullers couldn’t look through the camera lens while doing their job, because the camera operator was looking through the lens.

Nowadays, the 1st AC will usually have a monitor, but they also have to rely on detailed marks from rehearsal and a whole lot of skill. The 2nd AC takes all the camera notes for each shot and operates the slate, or clapperboard, to mark each scene.

They also haul equipment around, from cameras to media. If you’re shooting film, a 2nd AC is the film loader, who changes the camera magazines with rolls of film inside. And if you’re shooting digital, the 2nd AC is responsible for getting any storage devices to the Digital Imaging Technician, or DIT, who manages all the media.

Now, you might understand the nuts and bolts of a camera, but it’s all for nothing if you’re not using these tools to tell a story. Making the audience feel something because of moving pictures – that’s what makes movies magic!

From a voyeur shot through a window in a horror movie, to the subtle push on the love interest in a melodrama, there’s a language and an artistry to framing, angles, and camera movements.

Take the rule of thirds, which is a general way to think about composing a frame. The idea is to divide it up into vertical and horizontal thirds, and then stick what you want people to focus on where those lines intersect.

What or who dominates a frame can affect how an audience views a scene. And what’s in or out of focus can steer our attention even more. For instance, in the film Road to Perdition, the cinematographer Conrad Hall combined these storytelling tools really beautifully.

In one scene, a character played by Daniel Craig is dominating the frame, but the other two men walking away from him, played by Paul Newman and Tom Hanks, are the ones in focus. So our attention is on Daniel Craig’s character because he’s front and center in the scene. But because the other men are kept in focus, we can feel that he’s thinking about them – all through the visual storytelling.

Even if you can compose what looks like the perfect frame, it’s important to remember that cameras aren’t static!

Camera movements have their own language too. This is a pan, moving left to right.

A push is when the camera is literally pushed closer to the action in a scene. It’s like we’re leaning in, and builds intensity. And a pull is the opposite! The camera physically moves back. This could reveal something that we couldn’t see before, or help us leave a scene and lessen our connection.

Pushes and pulls are often achieved by using a dolly to move the camera closer and farther from the action. They have a different look to them than just changing the focal length of a zoom lens.

If you want to get really fancy, you can use a tracking shot to move the camera with your actors, like by moving a camera on a dolly parallel to the action.

Now, even how a camera is set up can affect the visual storytelling in a movie. A camera on a tripod is “locked down” and can make a scene feel safe and stable, like when a character who craves adventure is sitting at home in their regular life. But when they’re introduced to whatever’s going to rock their world, and jump up, the camera might move too.

Handheld Cameras

On the other end of the spectrum are handheld cameras. Think of those horror movies with shaky cameras – they’re harder to see and understand, but feel more chaotic and unstable. The real job of the camera is to capture visuals that let us enter the worlds of movies, and feel what the characters feel.

Knowing how a camera works can help strengthen your storytelling, but a lot of it comes down to becoming fluent in the language of film. And that, like all of these jobs, comes with a ton of practice.

Well, we talked about the guts of the camera and how they come together to make a versatile piece of equipment. We learned about the positions in the camera crew, and how the poetry of framing, angles, and camera movement are what make it a powerful storytelling tool.

Next, we’ll talk about the counterpart to the camera’s visuals: sound.

High-quality sound often goes unnoticed because, typically, our focus is on the narrative rather than the auditory experience. However, sound recordists and engineers must possess both technical expertise and a narrative intuition to effectively draw us into the film’s world.

You might look away from a screen if the visuals are jarring, but you pretty much always hear a film – whether it’s dialogue that was recorded on set, or a sweeping score added in post-production.

And the sad thing is: you don’t often notice really good sound recording and design.

Even though it takes just as much technical know-how and artistry as visual storytelling does. When sound production is most successful, you’re not thinking about the quality of the sound at all. You’re feeling it.

You’re pulled into the story and living in the world of the film.

Let’s start with the basics: the audience is gonna want to hear the characters they’re watching.

The Basics

And that all starts with the sound department on set, which is usually a small crew of two to three people. Its head is the Sound Mixer, also known as the Production Sound Mixer, Location Sound Recordist, Sound Engineer, or just the “sound guy.” This person usually supplies all the sound equipment for the production, and is responsible for recording all the sounds on set.

Every space has unique acoustics, so a good sound mixer will try to record as much as possible to make the world of the film feel real. That includes the sounds actors make in the scene being filmed.

Also, it includes wild sound, which is any extra lines that are said or noises that are intentionally created without the camera rolling, to be added into the movie in post-production. And lastly there’s room tone, the atmospheric sound in a space filled with silent actors, crew, and set dressing.

Having room tone helps the sound editors make the world feel authentic and consistent. The sound department’s second-in-command on set is the boom operator, or boom op, for short. This is the person you’ll see holding a microphone on a long boom pole out over the actors.

Actors will often have small body mics, also known as lavalier mics. But the boom op is working to capture sound from everyone and everything in each scene. To do their job well, they have to really know the script and the blocking, or how the actors will physically move through a scene. That way, they can position the boom in the best place to pick up sound, while keeping the mic and its shadow out of the camera’s view.

On larger sets, there might be a third person on the sound crew: the utility sound technician, also known as the second assistant sound. This person helps with a bunch of stuff, like: equipment maintenance, mic placement, cable management, keeping everyone quiet while filming, or even operating a second boom.

Now, I already mentioned the two main mics you’ll find on a film set: the boom mic and the body mic. But you have to think about a lot more than just where you put a microphone. When you’re speaking, you’re pushing air through your vocal folds out into the world. That vibrates other air molecules, making sound waves.

So, microphones nearly always have a windscreen to help record clean sound, and not just loud, whooshing noises from the air. It muffles air being blown directly at it without affecting the mic’s ability to pick up sound. A small windscreen is usually enough on an enclosed set, or on a soundstage, like this one.

Outdoors, you might need more intense windscreens.

Microphone Patterns

The sound department not only has to make sure they’re recording good sound, but they have to pay close attention to what they don’t want to capture. And they can do that with microphone patterns.

A microphone pattern is a shape around a mic where it picks up sound best, and there are a few standard types. Just like the camera department has to change lenses, the sound department might have to change mics from scene to scene.

First, you have omni-directional mics, meaning the mic is recording sound coming at it from every direction. There are a lot of situations where this is ideal, like for recording a conversation where people are sitting and talking all around a table. But on a set, you only want to hear the actors on camera, and not all the crew behind the scenes.

So this mic wouldn’t be the best choice.

Bidirectional mics pick up sound directly in front of and behind them, while rejecting sound coming from the sides. Their sensitivity pattern looks kind of like a figure 8. These mics are useful for interviews or duets – any time when two people are directly across from each other, with the mic in the middle.

Then, there are cardioid mics, named because their pattern is kind of shaped like a heart. They pick up more sound in the direction you’re pointing them, plus a little bit from behind and on the sides. A cardioid pattern is good for recording lines from one person at a time, up close.

So lavalier mics – the ones physically attached to actors – are usually cardioid or omnidirectional. If you want something a little wider than a typical cardioid, but not as wide as an omnidirectional, there are subcardioid mics. Or, say you’re trying to record a conversation where a bunch of people are huddled together and talking.

So you have several mics near each other, and you want each one to only pick up one person. In this case, a supercardioid or hypercardioid might be your best options, because they have even more directional pickup.

But the downside is that they also have more sensitivity directly behind them, so they can pick up things you don’t want to hear in the final film, like chatter from the crew.

If you need something even more directional, like for the end of a boom pole, you can put something called an interference tube over a supercardioid or a hypercardioid mic. This ideally makes unwanted sound waves from the sides cancel out, and creates a lobar pattern: you can aim them more precisely, and pick up sound from farther away. Because these mics are long and narrow, they’re called shotgun mics.

So on a typical set, there’s probably a shotgun mic on the boom pole, and a handful of lavaliers on different actors or hosts. Each of those microphones is picking up part of the overall sound in a scene, and each one feeds into its own track on the audio recorder where the sound mixer is.

There, the sound mixer can adjust the mic sensitivity and the recording levels. And all this is just production sound!

We still have a whole world of post-production to explore. Before editing anything, the very first thing you need to do is sync the sound with the camera footage.

And if you prepare during production, it’s pretty easy to do. Remember the 2nd AC? They’re responsible for the slate, which marks each take with both a visual and an audio cue.

To help keep track of media, the scene, shot, and take number are written on the slate for the camera to see, and are called out for the microphone to hear.

John: Scene 21 take 25! And then, the 2nd AC claps the slate shut.

If you don’t have a slate, you can clap your hands in front of the camera and the mic to get the same effect. The goal is to make the audio levels spike, while the camera catches the exact moment the clapper and the board of the slate come together.

That way, in post-production, you can manually match up that audio and visual cue and…voilà! Your sound is synced. If you want a faster way of syncing audio and video, we’ve got you covered too.

One way is through a timecode sync, if you’re using a digital slate. The moment the clapper hits the board, a signal is sent from the slate to the camera and the audio recorder. And the timecode of this exact moment is recorded on both devices, which you can use to sync everything up.

The second way is if your camera is recording audio too, which won’t be used in the final mix, called a guide track. That way, in your editing software, you have your video footage, camera sound, and sound from the audio recorder. And an audio waveform sync program can match them all up.

Post Production

Typically, an assistant editor syncs up the sound with the visuals, and then the editing team cuts together the film. Once the film editor and director agree on a picture lock, meaning the visual and story edit of the film is finalized, it’s time for the post-production sound team to get to work.

Like the film editor, the sound editor makes decisions based on things like story and the actor performances.

The best takes for camera aren’t always the best takes for sound, though, technically or artistically. And it’s up to the sound editor to make sure the best sound takes for the film to make it into the final mix.

On a bigger film, some sound editors will be dedicated dialogue editors. Like the name suggests, their job is to cut for the best dialogue from production sound. Ideally, the audio and video from the same take will both be great. That makes their job easy.

Often though, the dialogue editor has to borrow sound from other takes or wild sound, and sync the best takes for sound with the best takes for the camera.

This only works if the audience can’t tell it’s been done, like if the camera is on another character, so it takes a lot of skill and creative editing. If there’s not a great sound take, the crew will bring actors back into a studio and do some Automated Dialogue Replacement, or ADR. Some actors relish ADR.

Meryl Streep famously loves it because mixing separate visual and audio performances can add complexity to what her character is conveying. Of course, dialogue isn’t the only sound in a film. Sound Designers work with sound mixers and foley artists to create the sound effects that make the world of the film feel rich and whole, from birds chirping to the “pew pew” of lasers.

And music supervisors and composers work with the director to either curate or create the music of the film. Adding music frequently comes at the end of post-production. And when it’s done well, it’s the finishing touch that solidifies the entire film and brings it to life.

From an actor’s whispered lines to the final score woven throughout a film, sound helps us go from watching a story with relatable characters, to feeling what they feel and living in their world.

So, we learned about all the artists involved in production sound, and how different microphone patterns are best for different situations. We talked about the importance of post-production sound and the role it plays in deepening our experience of a film, and making the movie the best it can be.

And next, we’ll talk about the people who see everything, from the bigger picture to tiny details that could get overlooked on a film set: producers.

What exactly is the role of Producers? It’s a challenging question to address due to the diverse array of producer roles within the film industry.

No movie in the entire history of film has been made without a producer, whether or not they were credited as one. But no one ever seems to know what they do. To be fair, it’s a little confusing.

There are different kinds of producers, and people earn the title of producer for different reasons. But the job is really hard work. They’re the driving force of a movie: getting a film crew off the ground, keeping everything running, and making sure it gets shared with the world.

If a film doesn’t get finished… well, chances are, it could’ve used a team of producers.

Let’s start with a wide lens and then zoom in. An executive producer, or EP, oversees the whole filmmaking process and other producers involved in the project.

This person might be independent and run a small studio. Or they might work for a larger company, and represent the studio or the money person – the financier. An executive producer ensures a film has the funding it requires, and usually sets the budget and overall schedule.

They can be deeply influential on the style of the film, too.

Think of movies that were executive produced by Steven Spielberg. Or Judd Apatow. Or Tina Fey. They’re all different from each other, but distinct to their EP.

While the job can be highly demanding, sometimes people are honored with the title because they’re lending their well-known names to a production they believe in. These honorary executive producers might not be involved in the daily grind, but they’re very important in helping it get made.

If you have student loans, you’ll understand when I say that an honorary EP can be like a really wonderful co-signer. They’re standing behind your project and promising to the world that you’re going to deliver a film that’s up to their standards.

Even when a film has honorary EPs, it’ll still have an executive producer who’s keeping things running on a macro scale and looking towards the future: a movie they can sell and get to an audience.

Now, an EP is one kind of producer, and there are lots of different producer roles that we’ll get to soon. But the simple title of “producer” is usually where the job description seems the most… nebulous. Like, “what-the-heck-do-they-do” kind of nebulous. Turns out, there’s no one thing that a producer is or does.

Really, the title can be given to anyone who was essential in making sure the film got made. This could mean they found funding and resources. Or maybe they developed the idea, balancing big picture stuff. Or they might have brought the creative team together, and hammered out the details that make a film set run well.

So things can get a little confusing when you’re reading the credits of a film. But, not to worry, there’s a code that we can decipher. The person who we think of as THE producer will be listed in the credits after the phrase “produced by”. This is the person, or sometimes a couple of people, with the seemingly never-ending list of responsibilities.

They’re the point of contact through every stage of the film, and ultimately responsible for the movie becoming a movie at all.

In pre-production, the producer finds a project and develops it with a writer. Then, they gather the resources and hire the key crew members for production. During production, they oversee filming, and help run the shoot.

And in post-production, the producer works with the director, editor, and composer to finish the film. They can even have the editor cut scenes or schedule reshoots – if that’s what the film needs to come together.

Their ultimate goal is to crystallize the vision of the filmmaker and find a way to sell it.

Filmmaking is really expensive.

So financiers will pay for a movie up front, and you want to pay them back for their investment. Also, selling the film to distributors is the only way to get all your hard work out into the world. And it’s not really a movie until an audience sees it.

Now that we have a handle on producers, what in the world is a co-producer? This title is actually great, because it’s descriptive! A co-producer is part of a producing team. Two or more co-producers will produce a film as a unit. Sometimes, a co-producer will have another role in the film. Like, maybe they’re also a writer or an actor, so they’re not involved in all the producing responsibilities.

An assistant or associate producer works under the head honcho producer. On a large production, the producer delegates work to one or more of them. Associate producer, like executive producer, can also be an honorary title given to someone who helped get the film made, like because they lent their name to the project, or funded it.

Now, let’s talk about specific producer titles and their duties.

The line producer reports to the producer. And all the department heads report to the line producer. The line producer plans and orchestrates the logistics of the entire production, including scheduling, staffing, and managing how the budget is used. Does this sound kind of familiar?

On lower-budget films, the line producer and the unit production manager might be the same person. But if they’re not, the line producer plans all the budgets and other minutia, while the UPM carries out the line producer’s plans.

So, now that we’ve got the basic scoop on what producers do, here’s a puzzle for you. And, honestly, for the Academy of Arts and Sciences too. Who accepts the Oscar for best picture?

See, the director is often thought of as “the filmmaker,” but they’ve got their own category: best director.

So the winner of best picture is the producers! They’re usually the ones who chose to make this particular movie and who hired all the creative leads. So, they deserve some recognition too.

Sometimes you’ll see a director or writer run up on stage to accept the Oscar, because they were also producers. And there are a lot of reasons why someone would want to wear so many hats, even though it’s difficult work. One is control.

What we think of as the creative roles – like writer, director, or even actor – ultimately answer to the producers. So if you’re one of those producers, you have more control over the film. This can mean creative control, because you’re helping move the film through production.

Or it might mean financial or marketing control, because producers typically help decide what festivals and audiences the film will reach. Secondly, if someone has proven themselves to be multi-talented, studios will sometimes prefer to pay one person to do multiple jobs.

Because, remember, filmmaking is expensive! A lot of the time, director/producers or writer/director/producers are highly experienced auteurs who have the best understanding of a project.

So if they wear multiple hats, it can really help the movie’s success. That said, it’s extremely rare for there to be just one producer on a project. There’s still THE producer with the “produced by” credit, and the line producer organizing the production, not to mention any other producers and executive producers on the team.

That way, if the director-producer needs to focus their whole attention on directing at some point, they can! And the production will go on. Oddly though, the producing team doesn’t really seem to scale like other departments.

Across the board, there were a lot more people and departments working on Rogue One. For instance, the art department for Rogue One included 174 credits, while Like Crazy’s was just 4 people. But that wasn’t true for producers. Rogue One credited 10 producers, while Like Crazy credited 13.

So, how does a movie with a much smaller crew and budget justify having three more producers than one with a massive team and 800 times the budget? Well, there are a couple possibilities.

For one, a filmmaker can need an army, but you can also make a movie with a small group of multi-talented people. While anyone on a film set is most likely going to be a hard worker, on a low-budget film you end up relying on a few heroes who really go above and beyond.

Often, those people are thanked with a producer credit of some kind. Another option is that sometimes people who usually fill a different role on film projects, like a makeup artist or sound mixer, want to get into producing. And they’d do that by starting out small, and producing a low-budget film.

Third of all, independent films usually benefit most from an honorary executive producer lending their clout. So, more producers might be credited for name recognition reasons.

Fourthly, it’s a good way to stretch your budget. Like, if you can’t afford a lead actor’s salary, you might ask them to be a producer too, so the project will be worth their while. They’ll have another credit on their resume, a foot in the door to a new job in the industry, and more control over the film.

Any of these reasons could be why a small, independent film such as Like Crazy would have more producers than Rogue One. But, after looking a little closer at their credits, here’s a different guess.

You see, one of THE producers – one of the people Rogue One was produced by – was Kathleen Kennedy. She’s a very, very experienced producer and has led Lucasfilm since 2012. Think of some of the biggest blockbusters from the last 35 years, chances are Kathleen Kennedy was a producer on it. Jurassic Park? Yep. Back to the Future?

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The Sixth Sense? Indiana Jones?. And that goes to show how critical good producers are to the success of a film. Even though it might be a little confusing what they do, because they do so many things, it’s all incredibly important work.

And that’s it!

We discussed lots of ways a person can earn the title of producer. We broke down some different roles, from executive producers to line producers, and talked about how they each help a film get made.

Next, we’ll talk about the person who most influences what a film will be: the director.

What exactly do Directors do? It’s a complex question to tackle, but generally, directors serve as the primary creative force behind a movie. They determine the cinematic universe in which the story unfolds, how performances align with that vision, and how the camera portrays that universe.

Should I show you what a director does? Should I explain everything a director does? Should I try to get you to guess what a director does?

People often assume that the director has all the answers, but directors ask a lot of questions. According to American Playwright and Filmmaker David Mamet, directors only have two main questions to ask themselves: What do I tell the actors? And where do I put the camera?

And that’s a cheeky way of encompassing a lot of what the director should do. But maybe a better way of looking at it is that the director has a strong sense of where the answers are buried, and their job is to steer their team to where they can uncover those answers.

That might sound a little foofy, but it’s the clearest way I can describe what the job of a director is. A director must use everything at their disposal to clearly communicate to their actors, their crew, and ultimately to us, the audience.

A director’s job is to bring their vision to life in the film.

So, a common misunderstanding is that the actors are just like puppets, illustrating the director’s ideas. An actor’s job is to bring a character to life. And we need actors to think real thoughts and feel real feelings to make the film relatable. A good actor gives a director options, by making informed choices about how a character would act in the various situations that the script puts them in.

We’ve talked about the language of the camera, and how the way in which shots are framed can help convey a story. But the camera’s most important job is to read the characters’ thoughts. For that to happen, actors have to be vulnerable, and think as the character.

This is incredibly demanding work, so it’s up to the director to ensure that the actors have a safe space to explore their characters and take risks. And the actor relies on the director to steer them in the right direction.

Forcing an actor into a position where they’re unsure about how to act in a scene is one way to ruin their performance. If an actor feels like they need to direct themselves in a scene, they won’t risk losing themselves in the world of the film, and it’ll feel fake.

To give an actor the confidence they need to inhabit a character, a director must give clear, actionable directions. What do I mean by that? Well, let’s say we’re working on a scene about a breakup.

A clear, actionable direction could be, “Since your character has been blind-sighted by this breakup, you want to keep the other person from leaving the room so you can get answers.”

The actor receiving this direction now knows that their character has just learned that they were wrong about the other character, and they have a goal of keeping the other person there.

They know where they’re coming from and where they’re trying to go.

Now, no matter what happens in the scene, this actor can feel confident in their decisions if they’re working toward keeping the other person in the room. On the flip side of that, an unclear or non-actionable direction in that breakup scene could be, “You wish this wasn’t happening and it reminds you of when your parents got divorced.”

How do you act “wishing” or “being reminded” of something? That’s way too vague. But if the director knew what they wanted, they could tell the actor something like, “You see this person as the father who left you when you were 10 and, just like then, you’ll do anything to keep them here.”

So now this is a more actable note, because our actor understands the power dynamic of this relationship and knows that they’re using the same tools a 10-year-old would. And, most importantly, the actor now has a goal: “Keep the other person from leaving.”

So the director has a plan for how they’d like the scene to go, and the actors will add their own interpretations to that, and the hope is that they uncover the best possible scene.

It is possible for a director to get the scene they envision without allowing the actors to do their work, but this doesn’t build trust or create the conditions for a better film than the director is capable of imagining.

This is something author, and directing instructor Judith Weston calls result-oriented directing, and it’s a common mistake of new directors who are focused on the surface-level aspects of acting instead of the true work that goes into it.

Instead of working with the actors to unpack what the line means and what the purpose of the scene is, a director will focus on outward emoting and try to control how an actor does things.

You may have heard directions like, “On that line, laugh.” or “When you see her, you start to cry.” This tells the actor nothing about what their character is actually thinking and feeling.

A director might think they’re helping the actor by telling them how they should say the line or where they should put emphasis in the line, but this is called a line reading, and it limits the actor to just mimicking the director rather than communicating what the character is feeling.

A result-oriented direction will usually give the director what they think they want at that moment, but at a pretty high cost. These directors are only paying attention to what the characters look like outwardly instead of what’s going on in their minds.

And when you’re working with a good actor who’s thinking real thoughts, the camera — and therefore the audience — can pick up on those thoughts.

The result will be a deeper, more nuanced performance than when the actor is just pantomiming what the director tells them to do. It’s important to remember that filmmaking is collaborative by design, and while the director is the creative leader, insisting the film turn out exactly like the director imagines it will severely limit the film.

Result-oriented directing can also break trust that’s been built between director and actor. After all, if a director can’t trust an actor to experiment and discover what’s needed from a scene, then why should the actor trust the director?

The detrimental short-cut of line readings can be avoided by making time for rehearsal. And rehearsal is a great way for the director and actors to build trust. Some directors, like Sydney Lumet, are subtle about it. Lumet would tell each person where to sit at the first read through of a script.

This made it clear to the actors that he had a plan and was confident in his choices. Directors like Mike Leigh, are more overt about building trust in rehearsal.

Leigh purposely works with actors who are willing to explore themes and ideas before they even have a script. They work through proposed scenes together, and then Leigh develops a script around what they’ve uncovered together in the rehearsal process.

By the time the cameras are rolling, the actors have been living and growing as these characters, and they know how to approach every scene. From rehearsal to the final cut, a director’s job always includes guiding the actors in their roles and shaping those performances, but the director also works with every creative department on a film.

That’s what Mamet calls “where to put the camera,” but it involves much more than that. Just like with the actors, the director has to deeply understand the other departments so they can communicate clearly with everyone.

During pre-production, the director coaches the location scouts on what the film needs in its setting. They work with the Production Designer, set decorators, and props department to build the world and orchestrate everything in the mise en scene.

And before the actors even get to set, the director needs to understand the film’s characters to communicate their personalities and struggles to the costume designer. Both before and during filming, the director works with the Hair and Makeup and special effects departments to perfect the details of the storytelling.

And yes, the director decides where to put the camera.

There are an infinite number of ways to make a shot look cool or beautiful, but there is usually one best way to shoot a scene when you remember that every shot should be motivated by what the scene is trying to convey.

What’s motivating the camera placement and movement can be practical — like, if you need to show someone driving, we need to see who it is, and also see that they’re in a car.

But how the director decides to use the camera can also help us understand something about the character or the themes of the film more deeply. Starting in pre-production, the director and cinematographer work together to design the shot list.

They’ll usually work with a storyboard artist to illustrate what the shots will look like and work off of the storyboards as a reference. They can do this before the locations are nailed down, and it’s possible to work on it even before the actors are cast, because what determines how a film is shot is that blueprint we talked about before: the script.

Just like every line of dialogue, every shot should convey new information to the audience. We should be able to watch a film with the sound off and still be able to intuit what’s going on in the film. We should be able to know things like who our protagonist is, what they want, what’s standing in their way, and how they feel.

Once we know what to tell the actors and where to set the camera, there’s still one huge job for the director left: Post production.

Just like with all the other creative leads, the director needs to communicate the story with the editor and composers in order to tell the best version of the story.

The editing process introduces the final layer of discovery for the director. The director is the guiding force in uncovering the answers right up until the final cut. What the best version of the story is, depends on the director and the film. While a director leads their team in unlocking that best version, they’re also the decision makers.

They’re holding the whole film in their heads, and actors, cinematographers, designers, editors, and composers all give the director options they think are the right answers for this film. Then the director chooses which is the best.

Depending on the size of the production, the director might not be the one calling action or cut, but the director is always the one who says, “Yes, that’s what I want.”

We explored the director’s role as a leader and creative guide for everyone else working on the film. We learned the director must have a strong vision and be able to communicate it clearly. And we talked about how one of the director’s most important jobs is creating a safe space for the rest of their team to do their creative work.

One of those people is the cinematographer, who we’ll talk about in the next topic.

Who is responsible for capturing images in a movie? Who ensures that a film looks visually appealing, conveys meaning through light and shadow, and makes action scenes vivid and exciting? Obviously, this role falls to the cinematographer.

Movies are made up of a series of images. Some are beautiful, some are harsh, and some stick in our minds forever. Like the gently rolling spaceships in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Or Peter O’Toole riding out of the desert in Lawrence of Arabia. Or Darth Vader emerging from the smoke in Star Wars.

But who actually takes these pictures? If the director is the one who sets the vision for the film, whose job is it to bring that vision to life? That’s the person who puts the pictures in motion pictures. The cinematographer!

Cinematographers must be artists, engineers, photographers, and storytellers, all at once. Sometimes you’ll hear the cinematographer referred to as the director of photography or “DP.” But don’t be confused, it’s the same job.

In some parts of the world, they prefer one title to the other, but generally speaking, the two titles are interchangeable. And no matter what they call themselves, their basic job is to translate the director’s vision into things like framing, lighting, and camera movement, so that the film’s story, emotions, and themes are conveyed visually.

A cinematographer must not only possess great technical skills, but also understand the fundamental narrative beats of the film, the arc of the characters, and how the shots might cut together in the editing room. And the job begins long before the cameras start to roll.

During pre-production, the cinematographer assembles the camera department, plans shots with the director, and determines any special equipment that might be necessary for the shoot – from cranes and dollies to steadicams and special lenses.

They also help the director decide what kind of film stock or digital cameras to use and what the overall look of the film will be. During production itself, the cinematographer oversees the lighting and shooting of the film, shot by shot.

This includes supervising the camera department and working very closely with the lighting department — the head of which, you’ll recall, is the gaffer. Since pictures are technically just a record of light bouncing off objects, the gaffer is fundamental to achieving the images that make up the film.

Fresnel Lights

And when it comes to the lights themselves, the cinematographer has a lot to choose from. For example, there are Fresnel lights, which use special lenses called … Fresnel lenses … to produce a wide, hard light that softens at the edges. Commonly used for stage lighting, these lights can get very hot very quickly.

Fluorescent Lights

Fluorescent lights are much cooler and softer, but they’re quite fragile, which matters on a film set when the lights are being moved around so frequently.

LED Lights

LED lights create very little heat and are favored by a lot of independent and DIY cinematographers because they’re cheap and use less power. However, the colors and shadows they cast can be unreliable and difficult to match, bulb to bulb.

Incandescent Lights

Incandescent lights, meanwhile, generate a lot of heat, but they generally give a warm, yellow light that can be very appealing.

HMI Lights

And then we have HMIs, or… this… these are massive lights that give off an enormous amount of heat. They’re so bright that they’re often used to simulate daylight. As in, the sun.

So, that’s the hardware, but in addition to choosing which of these lights should be used, the cinematographer also has a say in how they’re arranged. The most basic style of lighting, used in everything from formal interviews to fiction films, is 3-point lighting.

You start with a key light, which is the brightest light, often positioned so that it shines most directly on the subject of the shot. Then you add some fill light, which is a dimmer and more diffuse light used to fill in the shadows created by the key light.

Finally, back light, which is usually brighter than the fill light, shines from behind the subject of the shot. This creates a “halo” or “edge” of light that outlines the subject and separates it from the background.

One of the questions the cinematographer grapples with is figuring out where the light is coming from in the world of the film. This will determine the direction, color, intensity, and quality of light that illuminates the shot.

Sometimes cinematographers will use practical lights, which are light sources you can actually see in the shot, like desk lamps or windows. Other times they’ll deliberately use artificial lights, or even turn to a more radical strategy to light their films.

Cinematographers Néstor Almendros and famously shot Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven using natural sunlight, mostly that brief period of the day immediately before sunset, often called magic hour.

While working on Catch-22, David Watkin said, “I’m going to do something rather daring. I’m going to light the actors with only explosions.” And he did!

Cinematographer relied on a unique combination of practical and artificial lights to create the unusual transitions and effects of Jim Carrey’s memory loss in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

is a master of style, shooting everything from Spike Lee’s He Got Game to Beyoncé’s Lemonade. When Gordon Willis decided to light The Godfather in such a way that Marlon Brando’s eyes would often be in shadow, it was seen as a risky and daring strategy.

Cinematographers were supposed to light a character’s eyes.

That’s just how it was done!

Instead, Willis chose to use this lighting “mistake” to illustrate the dark and unknowable soul of Don Corleone.

Now, the cinematographer also works closely with the production designer, who’s the head of the art department. The production designer is in charge of carrying out the whole look of the film, particularly the physical elements like sets, costumes, props, hair and makeup, but also non-physical elements like computer-generated images and how they interact with the physical objects on camera.

The cinematographer and production designer work closely on everything from the color scheme of a set to how reflective its walls should be. And for sure, in addition to the lighting, cinematographers have to consider all kinds of factors when setting up their shots.

Not only do the shots need to be cut together to tell the story, but they’re often constructed to have a beginning, middle, and end all their own. The director and cinematographer must decide how much of the frame should be in focus, using lens choice, film stock, and aperture.

Related to that, the cinematographer has to think about what’s featured in the foreground, middle ground, and background of the shot. The arrangement of these features within the frame can have a profound impact on the audience.

Color and contrast also fall within the cinematographer’s aesthetic toolkit.

Color can be used to draw our eye to or away from one part of the frame, make narrative or thematic links, or – as in The Wizard of Oz – transport us to an entirely new place!

Contrast, which refers to the ratio of the darkest parts of the image to the lightest parts, can perform many of the same functions. Before there was color in film, contrast was a particularly powerful tool for cinematographers.

Noir classics like Carol Reed’s The Third Man use deep, dark shadows cut by bright shafts of light to convey a sense of mystery and menace. Cinematographers might also decide to move the camera to evoke a particular feeling or psychological effect. This movement might be as simple as a pan or a tilt to follow the action, or as involved as Citizen Kane’s dramatic crane shot in through the top of a nightclub.

Moving the camera in toward a character can convey a variety of emotions, from fear closing in on them, to some kind of internal revelation. There are some pretty entertaining supercuts of push-in shots on YouTube. It makes you realize this technique is used everywhere.

Now, what happens after the film is in the can? The job’s over, right? Of course not. The cinematographer is heavily involved in a film’s post-production, too, because the editing process offers a lot of opportunities to manipulate the images that have been captured.

If a movie’s been shot on film, there are all kinds of options to change color or exposure by altering chemicals and timing, as the exposed negative is developed and processed. But whether the film was shot using traditional film stock or a digital process, most feature films are digitized at some point, to make the editing easier.

And once the images have been converted into digital information, even more options open up for manipulating the footage. Filters on photo apps like Instagram give you some idea of how drastically you can change a digital image after it’s been shot.

In order to maintain the look of the film, the cinematographer is almost always deeply engaged in this process, working hand in hand with the director, the editor, the post-production supervisor who’s overseeing this phase of the process, and the special effects department.

So, yeah, it’s kind of a big job!

There’s a fantastic documentary called Visions of Light that traces this history and art of cinematography. It’s out of print, but if you can find a copy of it, you can hear some of the original masters of the medium share their stories and see examples of their work.

As with much of film production, there are guidelines and customs when it comes to cinematography, but no actual rules. The right style of lighting or camera movement for one film will be completely wrong for another.

It’s up to the cinematographer to work with the director to realize their vision for the film, translating it into images that will be cut together to tell the story.

So, we talked about the multi-faceted job of the cinematographer.

We covered the various roles of the camera and lighting departments and how they work together to realize a director’s vision. And we considered some of the tools and strategies available to the cinematographer.

In the next topic, we’ll look at the fascinating on-set work of set designers, costume designers, and special effects make-up!

In film, ‘mise-en-scene‘ translates to “placing on stage.” However, it extends to everything captured by the camera. Production Design, Wardrobe, and Hair and Makeup professionals are responsible for setting the stage and ensuring the characters seamlessly fit into it.

‘Mise-en-scene’ literally means “placing on stage.” But in film, mise-en-scene encompasses everything the camera is capturing. It’s the set and how it’s lit. It’s how the subjects are framed. It’s the actors and how they look and what they’re wearing. It’s the props they’re holding and the set dressing they’re moving through.

Just as every line of dialogue and every shot should be helping to move the film forward, everything in frame should be helping to build the mise-en-scene. From the overall look and feel of the sets, to the details in makeup on the actors’ faces, everything in a film is designed and captured for a reason.

The Production Designer

Sometimes mise-en-scene is pretty obvious: think of the German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or any film by Tim Burton or Wes Anderson. These films are clearly stylized — the audience can tell that the sets, costumes, and makeup were all created and crafted by someone. But sometimes the mise-en-scene is more subtle, like in the realist film Winter’s Bone, or films by Lynne Ramsay or Kelly Reichardt.

The world portrayed in realist films might make the audience wonder what a production designer even did to build the world, because the scenes look so much like the world we live in.

But look carefully at the world of a realist film.

Just as the cinematographer uses the language of the camera to help tell the story, the teams creating the mise-en-scene structure the set and the actors in specific ways to bring the director’s vision to life.

The production designer creates the physical world of the film.

This person leads the art department, which builds and decorates the sets. Early in pre-production, the production designer is hired to work with the director to develop the look of the film. Depending on when and where the script is set, they’ll probably have to research what to include, and exclude, when building their world.

To make the scene accurate to the time, he had the art department bring in old corrugated metal and hung it over the new metal. This might seem silly. I mean who, besides the production designer, is going to know what year corrugated metal changed shape?

But, even if we don’t know the year, subconsciously we feel the differences. Imagine a scene in a classroom from your childhood. If you grew up in the 1990s and a film about your childhood years included students writing on chalk slates or if you grew up in the 1960s and the film included a smart board, both those things would feel wrong.

So, as soon as the production designer gets the script, they begin researching the time period and the location where the story takes place, to get the feeling just right. It might even be a time period in the future or a make-believe place.

But they still start with research.

After that, the production designer prepares plans and drawings for the sets that need to be built. And they go on early location scouts with the director so they can begin planning how they’ll use a location. Then they’ll present the director with their ideas for designing the setting.

Art Department

Once they’ve agreed upon a plan with the director, the art department gets to work. They work with the set decorator, also called a scenic designer, to research and implement every detail they’ll bring into the world of the film.

While the production designer is creating the look of the film overall, the set decorator is choosing the details and designing the sets. The production designer also works with the art director to budget and organize the department. They hire buyers who buy or rent set dressing and props.

Once the set is designed, the art department builds anything that doesn’t already exist for the set itself, as well as any special props that are needed. The art department masterminds what the physical world of the story looks like, but if the characters don’t look and feel like they belong in that world, then it’s all for nothing.

The costume designer and the wardrobe department, along with the hair and makeup departments, also play pivotal roles in creating the mise-en-scene. And the work of any designer starts, again, with research.

The costume designer uses pre-production to study the setting and the time period, including the season when the film takes place.

The costume designer’s most important job, though, is to understand the characters and how they grow throughout the film. By developing a signature look for a character, the designer can help convey the story’s plot and themes.

Maggie Smith plays both Professor McGonagall in the Harry Potter series, and Miss Shepherd in The Lady in the Van — two very different characters with different backstories and goals.

The wardrobe of the character can convey more about them than their opening lines. And as characters change over the course of the story, that change is often shown outwardly — and not just in makeover montages.

In Jurassic World, for example, Bryce Dallas Howard’s character Claire starts out in nearly all white clothes, implying that she never is outside with the dinosaurs and is disconnected from the reality of the park she works in.

But the costume designer played with what the audience already knew of the original Jurassic Park, and mapped out Claire’s wardrobe changes to quote those of Laura Dern’s character from the 1993 film.

That way, she becomes more connected with the story and thus more capable in our minds.

Hair Makeup

Design decisions like this help the audience get pulled into the film, but they also help the actors get into the minds of their characters. The director Tom Ford, who started his career in the fashion industry, has even sewn labels into his actors’ costumes so that they never feel like costumes, but like the characters’ clothes themselves.

This extra detail isn’t something the camera or the audience will ever see, but when your job as an actor is to believe in a pretend world while you’re surrounded by crew and lights, it makes the world a little more real and your job a little easier.

This is true not just of the clothes actors wear, but also the makeup they use and how their hair is styled.

Hair and Makeup, or HMU, are usually referred to as a single unit on set, and they often share a trailer, but they’re two separate, specialized careers. As with production and costume designers, pre-production is all about research and planning.

Hairdressers work with the director to develop how they’ll style the actors’ hair.

They’ll prep any dyes, wigs, extensions, or bald caps they might need. Because films are rarely shot in order, hairstylists need to be organized and plan how to maintain continuity throughout the film. This is often a reason wigs are used instead of dying hair.

If scheduling demands that an actor play a gray-haired version of their character on either side of a dark-haired version, for example, then it can be easier to work with wigs than back-to-back dying.

Makeup

And making a wig look just as realistic as real hair can be tricky. If it’s a period piece, they’ll need to know how to create a time-appropriate look, but with the safety and health standards of the current times. This is true for makeup artists, too.

Makeup artists need to understand each actor’s skin and create a plan that keeps the actor as comfortable as possible while also creating the look the film demands. Makeup is similar to lighting or editing, in that it usually has to be seen, but not noticed.

Whether you’re making a beautiful person camera ready, or building a look out of latex and airbrushing, the audience needs to be connecting with the character and their internal life, not getting distracted by their makeup.

Some makeup artists specialize in special effects makeup. But all makeup artists need to know how to create certain illusions, like cuts, bruises, scars, bad teeth, and tattoos.

Of all the departments on set, makeup, hair, and wardrobe spend the most time with the actors. Each department has a trailer at basecamp, but will also send a representative to set with the actors.

Final Looks

When the 1st AD calls “Last looks,” they’re telling these three people to check the actors’ makeup, hair, and clothing to make sure it’s camera ready. It’s their job to make sure the actors don’t have to think about these things and can focus on their work of being present in the scene.

And of course, all the designers working on a film need to communicate between departments to create the mise-en-scene and help tell the story. A really bright example of how this can all come together is the character Clementine, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The costume designer, hair and makeup team, and the production designer worked together to make the audience associate the color orange with Clementine. Whether it’s her hair color or her bright orange sweatshirt, they took inspiration from her name and the script and brought it into the mise-en-scene.

And if you pay close attention, they give us a big hint about the end of the movie by aligning her character with that color. That movie came out over ten years ago, so I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by saying that it’s about removing the memory of Clementine from the brain of her ex boyfriend, Joel.

The costume designer and the set decorator took great care in making everything in Joel’s world appear in grays and blues. But, when Joel wakes up from having his memory erased, everything in the scene is gray or blue except one orange vase.

Like every real character we come to love in our favorite movies, Clementine isn’t completely erased. So, we discussed the teams that play the biggest roles in creating the mise-en-scene of a film. We talked about how the art department creates the world the film takes place in, and how the wardrobe department interprets the character and the story through their clothes.

And we learned how the hair and makeup departments transform the actors into their characters on screen.

And next, we’ll talk about Grip and Electric, one of the largest crews on a set and the teams that add that final touch of the mise-en-scene: lights.

In this lesson, the focus is on some of the often-overlooked contributors to the film industry, Grip and Electric. They handle tasks ranging from assembling dollies and tripods to assisting the cinematographer in manipulating light with flags and silks, ensuring everything functions smoothly.

Moreover, on virtually every film set, experienced technicians are essential for safely managing electricity and ensuring adequate power supply, which is the responsibility of the Electric department.

Have you ever tried to take a picture of a sunset? How’d it turn out? It probably looked pretty bad compared to the real thing, right?

Now, have you ever taken a picture of your friend, when she was lit by the sunset? It probably looked amazing! The sun can be so fickle. But we need it for…life. Luckily we don’t need it for filmmaking anymore. We can recreate a sunset and make it last for hours.

We can light a lightning storm or make a room look like it’s lit with just a few candles, but still be able to actually see.

Light can highlight drama or play up humor or build suspense.

And, without it, the camera literally captures nothing.

Without light, film is…radio.

And the production departments that control all the light are usually grouped together as G&E: Grip & Electric.

We’ve talked about the designers who build the mise-en-scene through sets, costumes, hair and makeup, but the lighting design is just as important. A blank wall can be transformed with light and shadow.

I mean, you know this –– an Instagram can be made into art by controlling light and shadow. This is part of the reason Grip & Electric work so well together. The electricians bring in and control the light, while the grips control the shadow.

Both the grip and electric teams work together as an arm of the camera team. The Gaffer, Best Boy Electric, and electricians work with the cinematographer to design the lighting. And the Key Grip, Best Boy Grip, and grips work with all the non-electrical equipment for the lighting and camera departments.

The Electrical Lighting Technicians, or ELTs, are responsible for getting light, but also power, to the set. Like almost every crew position, it’s a mix of creativity and technical skill.

When it comes to lighting, though, it’s especially technical. Like, there’s math.

The Electric department has to make a new plan for every lighting set up and every location. This plan is informed by the look the director and cinematographer want to achieve, but also by the power that’s available on site or from the generators they’re able to bring.

So the electric team isn’t just lighting a set. They’re also bringing power to it.

A lot of power that could be deadly if it’s not handled safely. But who’s responsible for safety on set?

There are too many moving parts and changing orders on a film set for safety to not be everyone’s priority. So, trust me when I say, if an electrician tells you to do something on set, do it. It’s for your safety.

The gaffer and the electric team have to understand the capacity of their equipment and the power supplies that they’re pulling from. They also need to stay up to date on technology changes. LED lights, for example, are just starting to be used on sets.

But of course, the whole purpose of the electric department’s technical skill is to put it to use creatively and convincingly. It can be easy to think of light as just light, but think of the light in an old church or the light in a big box store. Different, right?

Think of a cold rainy beach or a sunny mountain top. It’s the same sun but it looks so different. Grip and electric teams work to control light, and one of the most important tools at their disposal is understanding color temperature.

Kelvin or K

Think again about that old church versus that rainy beach: they’re about the same brightness, but they’re different colors. The light in the church is what we’d call “warm”; it’s kind of orange.

Whereas the light on the beach is “cool”; looks more blue. That’s because the light has different color temperatures, which we measure in Kelvin, or K.

Typically, outdoor lighting is around 5600K, or what we call “daylight balanced,” because the sun’s light is 5600K.

Indoor lighting is 3200K, or “tungsten,” because tungsten is what the filaments in light bulbs are made from, and it puts out light at 3200K.

Color Temperature

Obviously, there’s a whole lot of wiggle room between those, and the camera needs to be set up to match the color temperature of the lights. When you see a video that looks really orange, it’s because the lights are tungsten but the camera is set to daylight balance. And vice versa when the video looks really blue.

You can get bulbs that are either daylight balanced or tungsten, but if you only have one type of bulb to light your film inside and out, you can change their color temperature pretty affordably with gels.

Gels are transparent color filters. They come in many colors, but they’re most commonly used in blue or orange. And they come in different densities, too, depending on how much light you’re working with.

Once the color temperature is right for the scene, G&E still has to control how the light moves. We talked about the basic three-point lighting set up when we talked about cinematography.

The key light, the fill light, and the back light, or hair light, all work together to give a scene depth and allow the audience to feel like they’re looking at a real space, not a screen. But you don’t just put up three lights in a triangle.

The electricians and grips shape the light to create the look the gaffer and cinematographer want. Under the direction of the gaffer, the electricians use the lights themselves to do this, and the grips use several tools to block and steer the light.

Because, remember that fickle sun? Light will go wherever you let it, but it needs to be guided. The first way to do this is with different lights. The key, fill, and hair lights usually descend in order of intensity. The key will put out the most light, then the fill, then the hair light. But, not all light sources are lights.

Frequently, the fill light is just light from the key light bouncing off of a white wall, a mirror, or, appropriately enough, a bounce board.

Bounce Board

A skilled grip can aim light with a bounce board, but beyond that, there are many more ways to control the light. The lights themselves have barn doors that control how much light comes through and how it’s aimed.

Barn doors are also where you can clip your gels, if you need them, with your trusty c-47s. G&E equipment gets the best names. A lot of the effort in lighting is spent trying to avoid unwanted shadows, but sometimes you need shadows to shape the light how you want it.

And the grips have all the rigging and equipment to do that.

Some of the most versatile pieces of equipment that grips use are flags mounted on to c-stands, to block, or “cut” the light. They’ll block light for the camera, but because the grip department oversees pretty much all the non-electrical equipment for the set, they’ll also block light for things like a video village.

And no, that’s not the last of the DVD-rental chains — it’s where people who can’t see the camera can watch video playback of what the camera is capturing.

Cutters

For this, the team will usually use a special kind of flag, called a floppy, because it has a floppy drape that can be opened to block out more light.

Flags are sometimes called cutters, too, because they break up the light sharply. But when the shadow needs to be more subtle, G&E will use diffusion. If the electricians want to lessen the intensity of a light, they can add diffusion to it, much like how they add gels.

On some lights they can add screens called scrims over the lens of the light.

Grips can also bring in flags called silks to put in front of large lights to diffuse them. And really big silks are used to protect an entire set from the sun for an outdoor scene.

Indoors, grips can control the light in a scene by using black wrap, or cinefoil, to direct light or seal the windows from sunlight.

Now, not only do grips have the power to block out the sun and build the rigging for light and shadow, they also build and manage the equipment for the camera department. In fact, the ways in which the camera moves are almost all built and maintained by the grips.

If it’s a locked down shot, the grips set up the tripod. If it’s a dolly shot, grips lay the dolly track and control the dolly movements. If the shot calls for a jib or a crane, grips build and control this movement as well.

Even handheld shots often rely on grips, because the camera operator may need to be on a ladder, which will be held by a grip, or they may put the camera on an apple box between shots, which would be provided by the grip department.

And, I can’t mention this enough, just like the electricians have to manage safety of the electricity and cables and bulbs they’re using, grips are always thinking about safety with equipment.

From the way a c-stand is positioned to the way a screw is tightened, there is a protocol and a language for everything the grips are doing to keep everyone on set safe.

Striking

Two of the most common words you’ll hear from G&E are “striking” and “points.” Striking is called when an electrician is turning on a light. It’s a courtesy for anyone on set to look away from the bright light, but it’s also a warning that something potentially dangerous is about to happen.

A fuse might blow, a bulb might break, and by calling “striking” the crew is getting a head’s up.

Points means someone is carrying something big and pointy.

Probably a c-stand. So be aware and watch where you’re moving. Knowing these two words will help keep you safe, and also keep you from being obnoxious on a film set. All good things!

Today we learned about the electric team and how it balances the technical and the creative sides of lighting. We looked at some of the equipment electricians use to shape light and talked about safety and language associated with the electric department.

We also talked about the responsibilities of the grip department and how they support the electric department, the camera department, and all the non-electric equipment being used by various departments on set.

We’ll get into even more movie magic with special effects, both on camera and in post production.

It’s likely that when you encounter the term “Special Effects,” specific visuals come to mind. Perhaps it’s the image of the Hulk wreaking havoc in a city, a lightsaber duel, or an otherworldly alien landscape. However, effects can also be nuanced and have been integral to filmmaking since its inception.

Sometimes it’s impractical — or physically impossible — to get the shot you want. Maybe the scene takes place on an imaginary planet. Maybe the film is about a magical creature. Maybe the story requires action that would be too dangerous to film in real life.

That’s when filmmakers turn to special effects and special effects makeup.

If film is an illusion, special effects are simply one more way to achieve or enhance that illusion. Whether it’s making Superman fly, allowing Fred Astaire to dance on the ceiling, or engineering a fight between Leonardo DiCaprio and one angry bear, vast teams of artists and craftspeople have devoted their working lives to making the impossible possible.

Let’s feast our eyes on the world of special effects.

We think of special effects as a recent development, but it’s actually been around in some form since the earliest days of cinema. Beginning with the trick films of Georges Méliès, filmmakers have been using things like double exposure, matte painting, tinting, and creative cuts to create magic on screen. And they’re still at it!

James Cameron can take us to the bottom of the sea – twice! – in The Abyss and Titanic. Ridley Scott can immerse us in the neon-drenched futuristic LA of Blade Runner. Films like Zodiac and Far from the Madding Crowd can use special effects to transport us into the past.

And James Gunn can launch us into space with a quip and a ship full of misfits in Guardians of the Galaxy. But special effects can also be used in much more subtle ways. Rather than draw attention to themselves, these effects are meant to go undetected by the audience.

Citizen Kane, for instance, is not much less fabricated than the original Star Wars. In fact, Orson Welles’ classic film was a pioneer in visual effects, optically printing massive exterior shots, and featuring sophisticated old age makeup – complete with cinema’s first use of contact lenses to give characters Cataracts.

More recently, dramas like 2010’s The Social Network used computer-generated imagery, or CGI, to complete city skylines and allow one actor, Armie Hammer, to portray twins. In Stephen Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning 2001 film Traffic, CGI was even used to create tears on a character’s face to enhance their emotion.

In fact, the vast majority of mainstream Hollywood movies of the 21st century include at least one shot that has been altered by special effects technology.

Special effects can be broken down into several main types, which can be used on their own, or combined to produce an image that meets the needs of the film.

Mechanical or Practical Effects in movies are special effects created on set. These include physical character creation, puppetry, animatronics, and more. Think of the Cantina scene in the original Star Wars film, before Lucas went in and used computers to tinker with everything and NO I’M STILL NOT OVER IT!

All those creatures were either puppets, animatronics, or human actors wearing prosthetic makeup or costumes. Pyrotechnics, like fires or explosions, also fall under practical effects, along with wind, rain, mist, snow, and smoke.

In some cases, even running water constitutes a practical effect. Unless the film is being shot in an actual location, someone has to plumb the set if you want water to run from the faucet.

Optical Effects

Optical Effects are created in the camera as the film is being shot using optical instruments. A lot of these techniques require extra equipment, skills, and time, and nearly all of these effects are now easier and faster to create using computers.

Optical Printing

Optical printing involves a combination of the camera, a projector, and a special printer. You begin by filming a live action scene, matting out the section you want to replace. This is called the “garbage matte.” Then you film a shot that you’d like to use in place of the matted section. This is called a “plate”.

Special Effect Compositing

Finally, you combine the two pieces of film in an optical printer, and voilà: special effect!!! Compositing is a technique now commonly called “blue screen” or “green screen.” Originally, black screens were used.

Actors would be filmed performing in front of the screen, and then the black screen would be replaced by a separately filmed background. The problem was, dark shadows also appeared black.

So any shadow on the actor’s clothing or face would also be replaced by the background. Not a good look.

Colour Cinematography

Colour cinematography and beam-splitting cameras allowed filmmakers to expose selective colours on two or three different negatives. Suddenly, it was possible to use a specific colour for the screen, one that would be much easier to separate from the actors or their costumes.

The first major use of blue screens in a feature film was the 1940 Technicolor spectacle The Thief of Bagdad, which won Oscars for both Cinematography and Special Effects. This technique continued to be refined until blue screens were the norm into the 1970s and ‘80s.

Green screens have become more common since the advent of digital cinematography, because green is less present in human skin and hair, and digital cameras are more sensitive to it.

Filmmakers use both blue and green today, depending on the cameras being used and the costumes worn by the characters. For instance, you might not want to shoot Superman in front of a blue screen, because it could make him look like nothing but a floating head, hands, boots, undies, a big red “S” and a cape. Again, not a good look.

Scale Models

Optical effects can also include scale models, miniatures, and forced perspective props and sets. These techniques allowed Peter Jackson to turn full-sized human beings into hobbits and then have them interact with human characters on the same set.

Rotoscoping

Rotoscoping is an optical effect that involves hand-tracing the subject of a shot, frame by frame, so that it can be animated or more meticulously matted into another shot.

Stop Motion

Stop motion, sometimes called Claymation, involves shooting a model one still frame at a time, moving it slightly between each shot. The Imperial Walkers in The Empire Strikes Back were created using this technique, as well as animated films from Wallace and Gromit to The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Computer-Generated Imagery or CGI

Beginning in the 1970s, another weapon was added to the special effects arsenal: computer-generated imagery or “CGI.” CGI covers everything from two-dimensional animation to the fully realized 3D world of something like Avatar.

Basic rule of thumb is: if the effect is made on a computer, it’s some sort of CGI. The first mainstream feature film to use CGI was the original Westworld, directed by Michael Crichton in 1973, and its sequel Futureworld in 1976.

The effects themselves were quite simple – a robot’s vision of our world, a 3D rendering of a spinning hand – but they actually represented an enormous step forward in the art and craft of special effects.

Nine years later, the very first photorealistic CGI character appeared, in the film Young Sherlock Holmes, in which a stained glass window shatters and the shards come back together to form an animated, sword-wielding knight.

This moment paved the way for major advances in CGI character creation…, from fantasy creatures like Gollum or Groot, to recognizably human figures like Benjamin Button or the young Princess Leia at the end of Rogue One. Other aspects of CGI were equally revolutionary.

Digital Compositing

Digital compositing made combining various images and image fields much quicker and easier. Keyframing, meanwhile, lets animators draw a character or object once, and then set points – or “keyframes” – to indicate how the image should move over a given amount of time.

This saves artists from having to draw each frame of an image separately. Now, what if your canvas as a special effects artist is actually a person? Artists who specialize in special effects makeup are trained in the same skills as traditional hair and makeup artists, and then develop more specialized expertise in creating things like injuries, old age, deformities, and the creation of monsters, aliens, and other creatures.

One of the first filmmakers to excel at this kind of special effects makeup was the actor Lon Chaney, Sr. Nicknamed “The Man of a Thousand Faces” for his ability to transform into other characters, he developed his own makeup techniques to star in Silent Era horror classics like 1923’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Rupert Julian’s adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera.

In the early days, major film studios had their own “in-house” effects teams. Then during the 1960s and 70s, the studios scaled back, and those teams set up their own special effects houses which were then hired by the studios for specific projects.

Today some of the most famous brand-names in the business include Industrial Light and Magic, founded by George Lucas in 1975; Digital Domain, created in 1993 by filmmaker James Cameron, along with master creature creator Stan Winston and digital effects guru Scott Ross; and Peter Jackson’s WETA Digital, which has created the effects-heavy drama Heavenly Creatures, most of the Lord of the Rings saga, and Avatar, among others.

Now, whether it’s in-house or not, the special effects team is most often overseen by a visual effects supervisor. Their job is to ensure that the effects fit the vision of the director and the needs of the film, and that the effects are completed on time and on budget.

In order to accomplish this, they assemble and work with a variety of special effects artists, from digital matte painters and compositors, to roto artists who specialize in rotoscoping, and lighting technical directors who work as gaffers in the digital space, making sure the direction, color, intensity, and mood of the lighting matches the rest of the film.

Pre-vis – or previsualization in film – artists help filmmakers anticipate what an effect will look like when the film is complete, and concept artists use illustrations to help filmmakers design effects, creatures, and environments.

Other artists specialize in rendering, animation, weather design, enhancing explosions, combining all the elements into a finished effect, and on and on. Special effects is an ever-expanding field, as new technologies emerge to make innovative effects possible.

If you’ve ever watched the credits on an effects-heavy film, you know they list hundreds of names under special effects. All those artists spend their days working to make the impossible possible, to wow us with their imagery, and to enhance the illusion of reality that is a film.

Yes, in this lesson we talked about the earliest days of special effects, from the silent trick films of Georges Méliès to the subtle work in Citizen Kane. We broke down some of the techniques used to create special effects before computers made it all so much faster and easier.

And we looked at a few of the biggest special effects companies and just some of the jobs available to special effects artists working in film today.

And next, we’ll talk about who puts all of these filmed elements together to make the actual movie. The Editor.

The Editor remains a silent champion within the filmmaking journey. Throughout a century of cinematic history, Editors have been tasked with refining raw footage into a seamless narrative, essentially uniting multiple elements into a singular entity. But what exactly is their process?

A movie is basically a sequence of shots.

The shots themselves may be beautiful or strange, kinetic or still, bright or dark. And, viewed individually, they might carry some meaning. But the real power of narrative cinema comes when you put those shots together. Suddenly they have context.

They react to one another, surprising us or putting us at ease. Cut together, these shots can create whole new levels of meaning and evoke emotions in ways only cinema can.

And the person whose job it is to make those cuts, to discover that emotional and narrative alchemy, is… the editor.

What is an Editor?

Like cinematographers, production designers, costumers, and makeup artists, editors must be part technician, part craftsperson, and part creative artist. They are responsible for understanding the technology of post-production, from editing software to integrating sound design, music, and special effects.

But they also need to have a deep understanding of film grammar, a gut instinct for character, and a powerful sense of timing. They are the final guardians of the story and the emotional landscape of the film.

A narrative film is a very fragile thing, and one misplaced cut can drastically change its meaning and impact. But as crucial as it is, the editor’s job is also to hide their work. Usually, their goal is to make the cuts appear so seamless that the audience doesn’t even notice them at all.

Like so many great artists, the best editors make their work look effortless. But trust me, it’s not! Among their duties, editors must be able to sort through hours and hours of raw footage to find the story.

They must train their visual memories to remember tiny differences between takes and shots, and imagine how they might be cut together. They must help the director separate the movie they wanted to make, from the movie they actually shot. They are fresh eyes, unencumbered by the challenges of getting a shot or the heartbreak of a performance that didn’t turn out.

Editors must also have the taste to recognize when the story isn’t working, and the skills and experience to offer some solutions. Another way to think of this is that editors are the first audience for a film.

An audience with the power to change it and make it even better. So how do they do it?

In the beginning, editors worked with razor blades and tape to physically slice the film into shots and then join those shots together. It was painstaking work. One cut could take several minutes, as opposed to the seconds it takes today using editing software. It was also more difficult to experiment with various cuts.

There was no easy, quick way to go back and undo a particular edit. Just more razor blades, tape, and time. An editing machine called a Moviola became standard equipment for editors in the 1920s, and not a moment too soon!

In addition to streamlining the process, the Movila allowed editors to watch the film as they were making their cuts. Then in the 1970s, flatbed editing systems like the Steenbeck and the KEM arrived.

Now editors could move the film backward and forward to examine their edits, and listen to the recorded soundtrack as they went. Flatbeds would remain the industry standard until the 1990s, when digital editing systems like the Avid emerged.

We refer to physical film editing as linear editing, because the process involves editing your way through the scene or the film in sequence, shot by shot, and choosing cut points as you go.

It’s also called destructive editing, since the editor is literally cutting the film, irreparably altering it with each transition between shots. When you edit digitally using computer software, that process is called non-linear editing.

Here, you can scroll to any point in the scene, or in the film, with the touch of a button, joining and rejoining shots in any order, as many times as you want. It’s also called non-destructive editing.

The main non-linear editing systems include the Avid, Apple’s Final Cut Pro, and Adobe Premiere. Each system has its benefits and drawbacks, and each editor must figure out what works best for each project in terms of budget, workflow, and ease of use.

Now, when the footage comes in from the set, the editor’s first step is to create an assembly cut.

Assembly Cut

This is a very rough version of the movie that cuts each scene together in its most basic form. They’re often very long and sometimes contain multiple takes of a given shot. The goal of the assembly cut is for the director and editor to see if they’ve captured the story.

Are there any major plot points missing?

Can the desired tone be achieved with the footage that they have?

Are there any technical problems with the footage?

Do the characters make sense?

Where are the plot holes?

Watching an assembly cut for the first time is often both a joyful and painful experience. There’s your film, all put together, coming alive for the first time before your eyes. But it’s also usually a Frankenstein’s monster of dead-ends, missed shots, and performances that haven’t been properly paced yet!

But don’t panic! Because there’s more work to do!

The next step in the process is to make a rough cut, or several of them. This is the time for experimentation, for re-thinking the structure of the film.

What if this scene goes here?

What if we move this line to the next scene?

Do we even need this subplot, or this moment, or this shot?

How can we build the tension, liven a flat scene, or make a joke funnier?

The editor uses rough cuts to focus on the bigger parts of the movie that aren’t working. It’s also where the filmmakers can begin to get a sense of what the ultimate run time of the movie will be.

Once those issues have been solved, the editor moves on to the fine cut. At this point, the issues are smaller, but no less significant. It’s time to fine tune performances, maximize emotional impact, trim some shots, and extend others.

Final Cut

This is where you ask:

When do we cut from one character or another?

Is it better to extend this shot by one frame?

Two frames?

Five?

How can we hide our crappy, animatronic shark?

Two frames can make the difference between Jaws and Sharknado. Then we come to the final cut. At this point we are achieving a “locked cut,” meaning no more changes to the duration or order of any shot in the film.

Color correction is happening. Visual and sound effects are coming in. Music is being composed, recorded, and selected.

ADR, or automated dialogue replacement, is being recorded and added to the film. And it’s all being mixed so that every image and sound in the film exists in proper balance, fulfilling the vision of the director, who’s now working through the editor and the post-production team.

Each step in this process is specific and important, but not necessarily distinct. Every film is different, so often these stages blend into one another. The editor might have a brilliant re-structuring idea in the fine cut stage, and open the film back up to rearrange some scenes.

Or the director might have a sudden desire to extend a pivotal emotional beat just as the film is locking the picture. However it happens, once all these steps are complete, so is the movie. And at every step in this process, the editor makes an indelible mark on the project … even if it’s not always obvious.

One of the most powerful effects of the editor’s work is the ability to shift a film’s perspective. Who the film cuts to, at what moment, and how long it remains on a character can influence the audience’s identification with a character and their experience.

Editors spend a lot of time asking questions like, “Whose scene is this?” and “Why?” Usually followed by, “Does it have to be that way?” and “What if we tried it from another point of view?”

Very often the director is in the room for these conversations, and if they can be open to it, an editor’s ideas can sometimes change the way they think of the film, opening up new and exciting possibilities.

The more films you make, the more you realize that you can’t separate shooting and editing. They’re bound together. The shots inform the editing and allow for all the experimentation that is to come.

Cinematographers spend a lot of their own prep time thinking and talking about how their shots might get cut together. It’s all designed to tell the story and evoke the desired emotions. And so much of it comes down to when to cut.

Best Editors

And how the rhythm of those cuts contributes to the emotional and narrative experience of the story. The best editors collaborate very closely with directors and bring out the best in their work.

The great Thelma Schoonmaker has been editing Martin Scorsese films since the earliest days of his career, from the split-second cuts of Raging Bull to the contemplative stillness of Silence.

Stephen Spielberg has worked with editor Michael Kahn ever since Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Quentin Tarantino has long praised the late Sally Menke for corralling his impulses and bringing order to his films, from Reservoir Dogs to Inglorious Basterds.

Walter Murch is one of the editing greats. He’s cut everything from Apocalypse Now and The Godfather to The English Patient. He was among the first old-guard editors to switch to a non-linear editing system, and he wrote the book on film editing, called In the Blink of an Eye.

In it, he lays out his six priorities for cutting away from one shot to another.

The first is emotion.

How does the shot affect the audience emotionally? What do you want them to feel? And does a cut add to that emotion, or take away from it?

The second is the story.

Does the cut move the story forward? Each cut needs to advance the story, not bog it down.

Murch’s third priority is rhythm.

Just like music, he believes editing must have a beat, a rhythm, a sense of phrasing. Is a cut interesting here, or dull? What does it do to the pacing of a scene? Shake it up? Or flatten it?

Fourth is something he calls eye trace.

How does the cut affect where the audience focuses in the frame? The editor should be aware of where they want the audience to be looking, and then use that to surprise or confirm their instincts, depending on what the scene is trying to accomplish.

The last two priorities charge the editor with being aware of both the two dimensional space of the screen as well as three dimensional space. These are fancy ways of saying the cut has the power to maintain or disorient the audience as to the physical space within the scene.

All told, the editor should be conscious of how the cut affects the audience’s understanding of the world of the film.

Editors are as vital to the filmmaking process as they are low profile.

By the time the film is screening in a theater, no one knows the footage, the emotional beats, the pacing, and the performances better than the editor. Without them, we’d just have a pile of random footage.

With them, we have magic.

And that’s it!

We talked about the job of the editor, as both a technician and an artist. We learned about the history of film editing, from hand-cutting film to using digital editing software.

And we explored the impact of the choices an editor makes in collaboration with the director, and how those cuts can bring a film to life.

In the coming lesson, we’ll explore marketing, the surprisingly creative work done after the film is edited, as distributors try to pitch the film to its intended audience.

Now comes the task of attracting an audience to view it. The marketing strategy for your film largely hinges on its nature. Is it a major blockbuster? This entails one set of criteria. Alternatively, if it’s a small, independent film, a different set of requirements applies.

Let’s say you made a movie. You wrote a script, prepared the shoot, assembled a cast and crew, shot the film, edited it, and sound mixed the thing until it’s ready for the world.

And it’s awesome.

Now… you just have to convince an audience to come see it.

These days, that’s more important than ever. With hundreds of films, TV series, and online videos competing for our attention, filmmakers and distribution companies need to find creative ways to make their content stand out.

From posters and trailers to celebrity press junkets, let’s take a peek at the world of marketing.

Film Marketing

In the earliest days of film, movies were the marketing. People bought tickets just to see pictures move on a screen. As it became clear that film was going to endure as a source of mass entertainment and communication, a permanent infrastructure emerged – things like movie studios and theater chains.

Those studios started making more movies to keep up with demand. And, suddenly, moviegoers had options!

Audiences also became more sophisticated viewers. They wanted stories, and they wanted stars. Film studios and distributors were faced with greater competition and needed to find ways to persuade people to see their film, instead of somebody else’s. That’s where marketing comes in.

And, in fact, many of the elements of cinema’s earliest marketing campaigns are still with us today. In the 1910s, the studios that made and distributed films noticed that more people bought tickets for movies starring actors like Florence Lawrence, Mary Pickford, and Lillian Gish.

So they began to market their films based on celebrities, which helped create the star system. Celebrities continue to be a powerful weapon in a film’s marketing arsenal to this day. They can be deployed to talk shows, magazine spreads, or press junkets, where hundreds of journalists are wined, dined, and given a few precious moments to interview a personality.

Today’s celebrities also leverage their own social media to increase hype around their movies. But as flashy as the star system is, in many ways, the cornerstone of film marketing is the poster or one sheet.

Whether they’re organized around an iconic image from the film, or covered with the movie’s most famous actors, these graphic designs can be used in print ads, transformed into billboards, or displayed outside theaters.

The best posters represent a movie in a single, powerful image.

Think of the shark rising up toward the swimmer on the Jaws poster, or the moth over Jodie Foster’s mouth from The Silence of the Lambs.

Posters often include taglines as well – brief, memorable catch-phrases that sum up the theme of the movie.

Like Alien: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Or The Shawshank Redemption: “Fear can hold you prisoner, hope can set you free.”

Film Trailers

Posters might also feature quotes from film critics.

Remember, this is all an act of persuasion, so if critics are raving, people might get curious enough to see a movie for themselves. Trailers or previews were another early development in film marketing.

The earliest trailers appeared at the end of serials, early short films that told a longer story in weekly installments. Each episode would end with some kind of cliffhanger, and include a shot from the next week’s film.

Once feature films became the norm, studios would mine a film for shots of its most famous actors. Then, they would pair those shots with title cards – or after the advent of sound, a narrator – to tell the audience how incredible the movie was going to be.

In the 1960s, American movie trailers began to break this mold.

Alfred Hitchcock famously starred in the trailer for Psycho, in which he gave the audience a walking tour of the film’s set, describing where various grisly murders took place.

In 1964, Stanley Kubrick made his own trailer for Dr. Strangelove. It’s a funny, fragmented creation, intercutting very short clips from the movie with title cards that ask the movie’s big questions.

Since the 1970s, films have also been advertised on television.

Jaws was among the first, featuring a shortened version of the theatrical trailer. And during this time, another big change came to Hollywood marketing.

Before the 1970s, the marketing departments of major movie studios began their work after a film was done. The studio produced the movie, and then the marketing people sold it to an audience. But by the 1980s, those studios had all been purchased by big multinational corporations, where the marketing professionals were consulted before many products were fully developed.

That strategy trickled down, and by the mid-1980s the in-house marketing departments of places like Paramount, Warner Brothers, and 20th Century Studios weighed in on which films should actually get made.

Studios like Marvel have taken this to a whole new level, staking out release dates and creating promotional material for movies before they’ve developed a script, hired actors, or picked a director.

Meanwhile, sponsorships and product placements have existed in some form since the dawn of movies, but in the 1980s, they reached a whole new level. Companies like Coca-Cola or Frito-Lay would pay to have their products featured in movies aimed at an audience they hope to reach.

And it often worked!

For instance, after Hershey’s agreed to spend $1 million marketing Stephen Spielberg’s E.T. in exchange for a prominent use of Reese’s Pieces in the film, sales of the candy jumped by a whopping 65% in just two weeks!

The Internet has revolutionized movie marketing in many ways.

Not only is it cheaper to deliver trailers over the web, but marketing departments can now target their material to very specific audiences. And savvy use of social media can amplify the marketing team’s message.

So rather than paying to advertise on every major television network, the marketing team of a new animated film can aim ads directly at, say, people whose browser histories indicate that they have young kids.

Now, when you’re marketing a film, first you’ll have to figure out how much you’ll need to spend. Generally speaking, marketing costs about an additional quarter to a half of a film’s budget.

So if you’ve made a new comic book movie for $150 million, you might have to spend another $75 million to make sure people know it’s coming out. And the problem is, now your movie has to make $225 million just to break even!

So where does all that money go?

Well, the biggest chunk of a marketing budget falls under something called Prints and Advertising, or P&A. Marketing departments will often buy print ad space in local newspapers and on billboards, advertise on the radio, or make a series of teasers and trailers.

Print Advertising

And depending on how you release your film, the cost of P&A can change. Each of these avenues has different marketing requirements, expenses, and strategies.

A theatrical release is generally pricier.

The film itself has to be physically delivered to theaters – which used to cost more when that meant hauling around heavy metal cans full of physical film. But there are benefits, too.

There’s still some prestige attached to having your film play in a movie theater. And films have to have at least a small theatrical release to be eligible for major awards like the Oscars, for instance.

And if you make a big enough marketing splash when your film opens in theaters, by the time it comes out on other platforms, people might remember hearing about it. Other films find release on cable television.

Marketing these films is somewhat less expensive, and the audience is easier to find – because they’re already watching the channel!

Channels like HBO, Showtime, and even the History Channel have produced and distributed movies and miniseries to great success in recent years. Then, there are paid streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu.

They not only distribute films that have had a theatrical run, but also let you stream original movies on your television, tablet, or phone whenever and wherever you want. These companies know more about who their audience is than anyone else. They know what you’ve watched before, what you’ve searched for, and what you might be interested in seeing next.

This level of detail is a dream for movie marketing executives… and a little bit creepy if you think about it too much.

Some movies get released on free streaming services, like YouTube or Vimeo. These films often aim their marketing materials at prominent users of a platform, hoping that someone with a few million followers will spread the word about their movie. This kind of marketing can be less expensive, but more time-consuming.

Movies also get released on home video formats like DVD and Blu-ray, and by film festivals, both live and online. Some movies use a successful film festival run to market their films to buyers – distribution companies who will then release the film theatrically or through video-on-demand.

These distribution companies, from the major studios to independent companies like A24 or Magnolia Pictures, will use their expertise and infrastructure to execute a marketing strategy and help the film find its audience.

Film festivals also offer movies a chance to be seen by critics, whose reviews can boost interest in a film and provide marketing departments with quotes they can put on the posters and DVD art.

Needless to say, different kinds of movies aimed at different audiences require very different marketing and distribution strategies. And while a film’s success relies on more than just its marketing, every film does need to find its audience.

For big-budget movies with a theatrical release, the opening weekend box office is key to their success. The money and good press from a big opening weekend can lead all the way to massive home video sales, successful sequels, and even theme park rides.

So there’s a lot riding on the marketing departments of major studios to get people buying tickets for their films right out of the gate. They have some help, because many huge Hollywood movies are based on characters or stories that people are familiar with.

Since audiences are already pre-aware of these stories, the job of the marketing department is to use tools like trailers, posters, commercials, or talk show appearances to make people want to see these movies right away.

Big-budget marketing efforts create a vicious cycle, though, since the high cost of a national campaign means the film has to make even more money at the box office to break even.

Smaller, independent movies don’t have the resources to throw 100 million dollars into marketing, but they don’t necessarily need to. These movies are often made for much less money, so they don’t need to break box office records on their opening weekend to be a success and pay back investors.

So whether you’ve made the latest Marvel movie or a DIY indie on your cell phone, marketing is an essential piece of the filmmaking puzzle when it comes to finding an audience and getting them excited to see your film.

We talked about the history of marketing, from the earliest days through innovative online campaigns. We looked at the ways marketing professionals use things like posters, trailers, and celebrity interviews to drive awareness of films.

And we explored the costs and benefits of various strategies for marketing large-scale blockbusters versus micro-budget indies.

Next, we’ll spend some time exploring that age old question: should you go to film school, or not?

Is attending film school worth it? It’s a question that doesn’t always have clear-cut answers. Your decision may depend on various factors. Are you aiming for a career in Hollywood? Do you plan to dabble in filmmaking as a hobby? Are you interested in studying world cinema? Do you aspire to become a director, cinematographer, or editor? And are you willing to invest in tuition fees?

Considering these questions can guide you in making the right choice.

Well, we’ll explore some key considerations to help you determine whether film school is the right path for you.

To film school, or not to film school? That is the question. Or it might be, if you’re interested in becoming a filmmaker. And it doesn’t have an easy answer. Some filmmakers, like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and George Lucas, attended film school and have thrived making feature films.

On the other hand, James Cameron and Steven Soderbergh have both won Academy Awards for Best Director without ever attending a single class.

Everyone’s experience is going to be different, but there are some things that you can generally expect to get from going to film school. And with some careful consideration, you might be able to chart a course that’s right for you and emerge as the next big thing.

The World’s First Film School

The world’s first film school was founded in 1919.

As with many early film schools, the focus at the Moscow Film School was on studying films that already existed, rather than actually making movies. The theories developed by the students and teachers in Moscow eventually gave birth to the Soviet Montage film movement and movies like Battleship Potemkin and Man with a Movie Camera.

In 1929, the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema Arts was founded by early cinema big-shots like Mary Pickford, Ernst Lubitsch, and D.W. Griffith. USC has maintained that close connection to Hollywood right up to the present day, counting George Lucas, Judd Apatow, and Star Wars: Episode 8 director Rian Johnson among its alumni.

And in 1965, two major film schools were founded in New York City: one at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and the other as part of Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

Although younger than the Southern California schools, NYU and Columbia have caught up in terms of the success of their graduates. Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, and Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee all went to NYU, while Columbia boasts Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow, James Mangold who made 3:10 to Yuma and Logan, and Jennifer Lee, the writer and co-director of a little movie called Frozen.

These days, there are film schools in almost every state in the United States, as well as in many other countries around the world. You can find them in big international cities like Paris, London, and Beijing, to smaller places like Austin, Texas; Mahwah, New Jersey; and Anchorage, Alaska.

Some are well known, like the programs at CalArts, the American Film Institute or AFI, or the University of California Los Angeles, better known as UCLA. Others are hidden gems, like Emerson College in Boston or Denver’s Colorado Film School.

The point is: if you decide that film school is right for you, you have options, no matter where you live. So what will you learn if you go?

What Will You Learn if You Go?

Film schools can be undergraduate or graduate programs at universities, colleges, and community colleges. They might be free standing degrees at those schools, or they might be housed in other departments, like English, Fine Arts, Theater, Media Studies, or Communications. Most film schools will teach you to both study and make films.

Education isn’t necessarily just about practicing a trade. It can also be about exposing yourself to other ways of thinking, writing, creating, or watching.

In other words, it can be a time for experimentation!

Classes on film history, theory, and criticism will introduce you to films, filmmakers, film movements, and various ways to think critically about them.

While courses on things like screenwriting, cinematography, directing, and editing will give you the skills and experience you’ll need to produce your own films.

These same subjects are taught in many film schools, but teaching methods can differ. Most schools follow either the conservatory or liberal arts approach.

Conservatory schools, like the American Film Institute, the New York Film Academy, and to some extent NYU, focus on educating world-class artists and technicians devoted to a single field within filmmaking.

Very early on at a conservatory school, you’ll choose a “track” with help from faculty and advisors, and you’ll study that subject almost exclusively. You might decide to become an editor, a cinematographer, a director, or a sound designer, and your classes and exercises will be geared toward the craft, art, and technology of that particular role.

As a result, conservatory schools tend to turn out graduates who excel at their particular job and know it inside and out.

If you’re looking for a broader understanding of cinema and its place in the world, or you don’t yet know which track you want to pursue, a liberal arts-based film school might be a better fit.

In practice, liberal arts film schools offer students the chance to try a variety of filmmaking roles, and gain a deeper understanding of the whole filmmaking process, rather than just one specific part of it. And while students will still learn how to line up a shot or make a rough cut, they’ll also be encouraged to think about cinema in its larger cultural, economic, historical, and political contexts.

Of course, you’ll also find film schools that split the difference between these two approaches, providing a broad liberal arts education for initial courses, and pivoting to a more track-based curriculum for the later ones.

What Does Film School Get You First? So what does film school really get you? First and foremost: time.

School gives you the time to focus on the craft of filmmaking in a structured environment. Time to fail, learn from your mistakes, and try again. And time to experiment and find your artistic voice, while you’re given critical feedback from teachers and your fellow students.

Depending on where you go, film school might also let you move closer to a filmmaking hub, be it New York, Los Angeles, or even Chicago, Atlanta, or Austin.

Just being close to the action can be a powerful motivator for aspiring filmmakers.

Technology

In terms of technology, many film schools give you the opportunity to get your hands on a lot of the equipment you’ll find on sets – like jibs, dollies, cameras, or microphones– while an expert helps guide you.

And you’ll learn to collaborate!

Film is an intensely collaborative industry and medium, and being forced to rely on and work with your peers is a big part of the film school experience. Even more importantly, film school gives you access to a community of people who are just as obsessed with films and filmmaking as you are!

That network of teachers, mentors, and trusted peers will become your allies as you all develop your creative projects and find opportunities to work in the film industry.

Many film school graduates think of this community as one of the biggest benefits of their formal education. And, of course, you’ll earn a degree. A degree can have value as a symbol of your passion, commitment, and follow-through, but, sadly, it doesn’t guarantee you a job or a career.

Arguments Against Attending Film School

And that leads us into some arguments against attending film school. It’s expensive. Not only will you pay tuition, but you’ll have to fund your own films. And don’t forget, you might have to move to a bigger, pricier city to pursue your dreams.

Not to mention, film is an exceptionally competitive industry that often depends on who you know and how good you are at your job. There’s a lot of luck and timing mixed in with the tenacity, hard work, and talent required to succeed. Also, your learning style might not be suited to a classroom.

Some people thrive in an academic environment, while others do better with a hands-on approach or more unstructured exploration. If that’s you, film school might not be the best option.

But if you decide film school is too expensive or not a good fit, there are a number of other paths you can take to become a professional filmmaker. Many directors started out working as crew members on other people’s films before making movies of their own.

Alfred Hitchcock began as a title designer, and worked his way up to directing classics like Psycho and Rear Window.

Before dreaming up The Terminator, Aliens, Titanic, and Avatar, James Cameron got his start as a set painter for famous B-movie producer Roger Corman. Cameron reportedly mastered so many different skills that, today, his crew members talk about upping their game because he can probably do their job at least as well as they can.

This kind of apprenticeship approach was even built into the structure of some international film industries until fairly recently. Up until at least the 1980s in England, for example, most directors were obligated to put in their time as an Assistant Director before they were given the chance to make their own films.

In the 1990s, though, A-list directors like Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh took an entirely different path. Instead of apprenticing for other filmmakers, they both studied hundreds if not thousands of films on their own, with a focus and intensity most film students couldn’t muster. Their feature film debuts – Reservoir Dogs and sex, lies, and videotape – both display an incredible grasp of storytelling, film grammar, and tone, at a level remarkable for self-taught directors.

Paul Thomas Anderson, acclaimed director of Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood, split the difference. He was an intense student of film long before he got to film school… and then dropped out after the first day!

The proliferation of things like Blu-ray special features and online tutorials make this kind of DIY approach more possible than ever before.

“Lessons from the Screenplay” on YouTube and the website and podcast ScriptNotes are great resources for screenwriters. While sites like Cinematography.com can teach you tips and tricks about cameras, lighting, and special effects.

In fact, the falling cost of film equipment and the ability to distribute your work on the Internet has done more to change the film school equation in the last decade than anything else. You can build online communities and peer groups of like-minded filmmakers from around the world, which might make film school less necessary.

And it’s not like Warner Brothers is gonna turn you down for a directing job because they find out you don’t have a degree!

Think about it this way. If you want to become a doctor, you need to go to medical school, right? If you can afford it and your grades are good enough, you’ll graduate and – boom – you’re a doctor. It doesn’t guarantee you a job, but it does mean you’re very likely to find work in the medical field. It’s also the only way to become a doctor.

Is Film School the Right Choice For You?

For filmmakers, film school is just one of many paths you might take. That’s the great advantage and drawback to pursuing a career in film: you can get there any number of ways… but none of them are guaranteed. So, is film school the right choice for you? I can’t tell you that.

But luckily, the person who can tell you is reading this topic right now. …It’s you, I’m talking about you. Take some time and think about the environments in which you learn best, the communities you could build and be a part of, and what you can afford.

Remember: whatever form your education takes, it’s the work you do, and the kind of collaborator you become, that matter most.

And we talked about the history of film school and the different approaches they take to educating filmmakers. We discussed the benefits of film school, from access to equipment, peer groups, and mentors to the time to make mistakes.

And we looked at other options, from apprenticeships to self-education and building your own community of collaborators online.

Next, in our last lesson, we’ll focus our attention on the history and exciting current state of television production.

These days, you might turn on the TV and think you’d been transported to a movie theater. Oscar-winning movie stars are all over television shows, directors known for big screen blockbusters, like David Fincher and Martin Scorsese, have found success working in television.

And the advent of streaming services and premium cable networks have expanded not only how we watch shows, but also the kinds of shows that get produced. Edgier content that used to be reserved for feature films is now being explored every day on TV.

As the line between cinema and television continues to blur, no discussion of film production would be complete without tackling the TV landscape and how television production has come to look a lot like making movies.

Television includes a huge variety of content that can be broken down into a bunch of different categories, from prestige dramas and traditional sitcoms, to infomercials, soap operas, and 24-hour news networks.

One of the most basic ways to categorize TV shows is to divide up scripted and unscripted content. Scripted TV simply means there was a script written for the show.

So that’s everything from Game of Thrones and Empire to Family Ties and Quantum Leap.

Unscripted TV is – you guessed it – any show made without a script. This can include reality TV, like The Bachelor or House Hunters, as well as sports games, awards shows, and cable news.

We’ll talk about scripted TV, since that’s closest to film.

We’re also going to focus on television in the United States. We’d be here all day if we dove into how other countries produce and monetize TV shows!

Now, television can also be broken down in terms of how it’s delivered to the audience, which has a major impact in how the money is made and what shows make it onto the air.

The four main kinds of contemporary TV networks are broadcast networks, basic cable, premium cable, and streaming services.

Today, there are five major broadcast networks in the United States: NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and The CW. There are a handful of other ones, like PBS, which offer more specialized programming and operate under different economic models. But these five major broadcast networks make most of their money through on-air advertising – things like restaurant commercials, pharmaceutical ads, or geckos selling you car insurance.

So broadcast networks want to reach as many eyeballs as possible, by making their shows widely appealing. A season is traditionally a year’s worth of episodes – often 22 for broadcast network dramas and sitcoms, and more like 8 to 12 on cable. And if networks cram more episodes into each season, they can sell more commercial blocks.

Which is why NCIS runs for 22 episodes a season on CBS, and has since 2003!

The more people watching a network’s shows, the more money advertisers will pay, which is why ratings matter to broadcast networks. Ratings are a measurement of how many viewers watch each episode of television.

Nielsen Research Media

In the United States, the Nielsen Research Media rating system has become the industry standard for figuring out how popular a show is. Nielsen ratings rely on complex statistical sampling, the same technique used for predicting the outcome of political elections.

The Nielsen team monitors the TV viewing habits of a sample of American households, and then extrapolates from those numbers to arrive at a rating for each episode.

Among the various problems with this system, the sample size is really small. Something like 5,000 households are used to determine the entire nation’s viewing habits. Also, the advent of DVRs has made collecting reliable viewership data trickier, because lots of people record shows and watch them later.

Officially, Nielsen Research Media counts DVR numbers in a show’s rating if the episode is watched within one week of the original air date. But if you save every episode of American Horror Story to marathon in one terrifying sitting, that doesn’t count.

Even with these flaws, broadcast networks continue to use Nielsen ratings to decide which shows get renewed and which get the ax.

Basic Cable Networks

Basic cable networks operate similarly, but don’t have as much pressure to reach a massive audience. These include all the channels you get with the standard package from your cable company, like TNT, USA, AMC, the Disney Channel, the History Channel, and Sy-Fy… Also all those other channels you zip past to get to your favorites.

Basic cable networks make money through on-air advertising, like broadcast networks. But they also charge a carriage fee to the cable company that “carries” the network into your home. That means that basic cable shows can appeal to a more niche audience, and still make a profit.

Especially if that audience is likely to spend money on high-end and luxury products. So Mad Men was a hit for AMC, even though only 2 million people watched it each week, while each episode of The Big Bang Theory reaches almost 20 million people for CBS.

Premium Cable Networks

Premium cable networks, like HBO, Showtime, and Starz, abandon on-air advertising altogether, and rely largely on monthly fees paid by each viewing household for income.

So ratings matter much less for these channels, and they measure success in other ways. Game of Thrones and Girls aren’t expected to draw 15 million viewers each week. Instead, HBO hopes lopped-off heads and hilarious 20-somethings will create enough cultural excitement that more people sign up for the network.

Streaming services that produce original content, like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu, also rely on a subscription model. A show like Transparent is a hit because it makes more people pay for Amazon Prime, not because it can compete with Quantico for viewers.

All these different kinds of networks matter because they affect which shows get made, how they’re produced, and what subject matter they can tackle!

Since broadcast network shows need to appeal to a wide audience to make money, premium cable and streaming series can tell more challenging stories with higher levels of sexuality, violence, and harsh language.

That doesn’t make premium cable shows better, but it certainly makes them different! And just like film distribution went through big changes after home video, video-on-demand, and now streaming services, TV networks have many ways to get their shows to an audience.

The old broadcast model used to rely on first-run episodes followed by re-runs, where the network would air old episodes of their own shows later in the week or over the summer.

Syndication

If a show was successful enough to run a hundred episodes or so, it might be sold into syndication. This is where the studio that actually made the show starts licensing the existing seasons directly to local TV affiliates.

These days, premium cable series sometimes make the syndication leap to basic cable networks, like when A&E bought the rights to air a slightly tamer edit of The Sopranos, which originally aired on HBO.

Premium cable channels like HBO and Showtime have set up their own streaming services too. That way, they can keep sole ownership of their content and sometimes bypass cable companies altogether.

Now, in many ways, producing scripted television and making feature films are remarkably similar. Writers write scripts, producers assemble crews of cinematographers, gaffers, costume designers, and so on, directors oversee the shooting of the scenes, and editors cut them together.

In other ways, they’re fundamentally different.

Most obviously, TV series are way longer. A show might run anywhere from 6 episodes per season on premium cable, to a whopping 22 episodes per season on a broadcast network.

And super successful shows like Friends or Grey’s Anatomy might keep airing for more than a decade.

That’s a lot of story, which means a lot of scripts, locations, characters, and shooting days, which means more writers, producers, actors, and crew. And longer shooting schedules.

If film shoots are grueling, shooting a TV series can be a full-on marathon!

Also, unlike feature films, the main creative decision-maker on a TV series is a writer-producer called a showrunner. Very often, the showrunner is also the creator of the series and the sole writer of the show’s pilot, a test episode that helps the network choose which series to make.

Showrunners can oversee everything from the story direction and writing, to hiring directors, and even editing the series.

Most shows have a writers room, where a group of writers gather to outline and write the series’ episodes. On broadcast network shows, the writers room may have as many as 15 or 20 people. But for cable series, the writers room is often much smaller.

One season of Game of Thrones is regularly written by only three or four people. And on rare occasions, a single writer may be responsible for an entire season.

Michael Hirst writes every episode of Vikings.

Nic Pizzolatto wrote the first two seasons of True Detective.

When it comes time to film the show, most series divide their episodes among a number of different directors. Usually, the director of the pilot helps set the look and feel of the series, and stays involved as a producer to make sure future episodes remain true to the original vision.

On occasion, a season of a premium cable or streaming series might all be directed by one person. Cary Fukunaga directed all eight episodes of True Detective season one, giving that story a cohesive quality that’s unusual on television.

For actors, working on a TV series can be a major commitment.

Most series are designed to last for several seasons, so an actor might spend years playing the same part. That’s great for job security – something many actors struggle with – but it can also make an actor feel trapped in a role or a show.

While film franchises do have recurring characters, like Harry Potter, James Bond, or any of those Fast and Furious drivers, they’re the exception rather than the rule.

More and more, TV series are being produced like feature films.

This is especially true for single-camera shows – everything from comedies like Atlanta or Master of None to mysteries like Castle, sci-fi epics like The Expanse, or realistic dramas like Friday Night Lights.

They look and feel like movies, as though each scene is happening in an actual location within the world of the story. They also allow for more control over the shooting and editing of the show.

Three-camera shows, on the other hand, are about as far away from feature films as scripted TV gets! They’re almost always sitcoms, and often performed on a stage in front of a “live” studio audience.

Think of Cheers or The Big Bang Theory. These shows look more artificial because… well… they clearly are.

Multiple cameras capture the action, the sets are designed to only be shot from one direction, and the editing mixes mostly wide shots with pre-recorded or enhanced laugh tracks. They can be hysterically funny, but they don’t seem that real.

Across different types of productions, more actors, directors, writers, producers, and crew members are working in both TV and film. We even have universes that crossover, thanks to Marvel, and limited TV series like HBO’s Big Little Lies that feel like extended movies.

It’s an exciting time to be involved in both movies and TV, as an artist and a viewer, where the only downside is there’s not enough time to see it all!

And, we talked about the difference between broadcast and cable networks, and how new streaming services are changing the definition of television. We looked at how ratings impact what shows make it to air, and how the subscriber model of premium cable and the streaming services allow them to make edgier shows.

And we discussed how TV shows are actually made, from the power of the showrunner to the difference between single camera and 3-camera shows.

The end of the Free Film Production Course with Courses Buddy.

Remember! Don’t forget to flourish and thrive!

https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/e-books/library/

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https://www.udemy.com/course/filmschoolcinema101/

https://www.wikihow.com/Film-a-Movie

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