Pre-Production For Your Independent Film
What is a 'production company'?
A production company is the one that's really going to be able to go out there and help you make the movie. They're going to help you develop the script if you sell your script to a production company or are working closely with a production company. They're going to use their resources to cast the film and to shoot the film and they're going to help you really develop and make the movie. Every major actor in Hollywood right now has their own production company. It's basically a fancy way of saying you have people that will read material for you and help you sell and distribute material. Whether you're Brad Pitt or just a kid out there who's trying to make his first film, you can have a production company and that's the entity or business you use so that if something happens in making your movie, whether it's a licensing issue with the rights - who holds the rights to your material - or something happens on set where you're being sued, the company gets sued, not you the individual. That's why people set up production companies. It's just the business behind what they do in the movie. If something happens, they're not personally liable. The production company is liable instead.
Who is hired during pre-production?
During pre-production you're hiring all the people who are necessary for the nuts and bolts of making a movie. This means your director of photography, your stylist or wardrobe people, and your makeup people. You're planning out your tech guys, and the lighting guys, and the actors themselves, and even the editor! Anybody who's involved with making the movie is getting hired during the pre-production phase.
What is a 'director of photography'?
The director of photography is the one who's actually going out there and shooting the movie. A lot of people think that it's the regular director who's doing that, but it's not. The director of photography is in charge of the lighting and how it looks on the camera and how it looks in frame. Often, they're the one who's got the camera on their shoulder, while the director will be watching on a monitor, sometimes half a block a way. The director is there to organize and to give direction to the director of photography and to the actors, and to have their vision be told, but the director of photography is the one who knows how to work with the camera, the lights, the balances and the bounce boards. Everything aesthetically on screen is the responsibility of the director of photography.
What is a 'production schedule'?
A production schedule is how long it's going to take you to go out and shoot the movie and then edit the movie as well. Sometimes the shoots for films are a week, ten days, thirty days. For most independent films, between twenty and thirty of actually shooting the movie is pretty standard and then however many months of post-production. I just saw a film directed by Adrian Grenier who stars in Entourage, and it's an independent film he shot with his friends before he got famous, in 1999 or 2000. It's the story of him looking for his father in real life and it took him seven years to edit all the footage. The movie took a summer to shoot and seven years to edit. Every independent film has a different timeline. Traditionally, for dramatic films, acted films and feature films, not just documentaries, twenty to thirty days is a pretty standard shoot, while for a studio film you might see fifty or sixty days of production.
