Unit 1 – Task 1A In my own words I think that pre-production basically means finding and completing all the areas, which are needed before you start creating a major TV series or blockbuster movie. From research, to casting and scriptwriting, to hiring (production team, screenplays, sets, equipment etc.) Personnel: For my first example of describing the personnel side of pre-production, I am going to use the TV show, The Vampire Diaries , to explain the size of the team, job roles, experience etc. For this specific TV show, the size of the production team involves approximately 1000 people, whom have been involved through its entire airing time of 5 years. These job roles range from *producers, *directors, *scriptwriters, *editors, make-up artists, cinematographers, casting, set designers and many more. I have also found that there is approximately 50 people involved in producer, executive producer and co-executive producer roles which is probably because of the fact that it is a TV series and therefore has different people producing different episodes, as well as
Transcript
Unit 1 – Task 1A
In my own words I think that pre-production basically means finding and completing all the areas, which are needed before you start creating a major TV series or blockbuster movie. From research, to casting and scriptwriting, to hiring (production team, screenplays, sets, equipment etc.)
Personnel:
For my first example of describing the personnel side of pre-production, I am going to use the TV show, The Vampire Diaries, to explain the size of the team, job roles, experience etc.For this specific TV show, the size of the production team involves approximately 1000 people, whom have been involved through its entire airing time of 5 years. These job roles range from *producers, *directors, *scriptwriters, *editors, make-up artists, cinematographers, casting, set designers and many more. I have also found that there is approximately 50 people involved in producer, executive producer and co-executive producer roles which is probably because of the fact that it is a TV series and therefore has different people producing different episodes, as well as the fact that it is an on going series which needs different views exaggerated so that it stays interesting and so people don’t stop watching it. There’s one producer specifically called ‘Pascal Verschooris’ who is involved in 6 different producing jobs which suggests that it’s easier and cheaper for the show to simple hire someone like Pascal who has all of these skills instead of hiring one person for each producing job needed. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1405406/fullcredits/ - accessed: 16th October 2014 – Authored by ‘IMDB’)
For my second example of describing the personnel side of pre-production, I am going to use the film, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, to explain the differences of it’s size of the
team, compared to that of a TV series. As well the larger scale of job roles and experiences. For this specific film, the size of the production team, triples the size of the one found in The Vampire Diaries, reaching approximately 3000 people with whom some have been involved since the first film was in pre-production in 2011. The job roles are almost equal to The Vampire Diaries but they also have stuntmen/women, art directors, prop maker, set dressers, special effects team, visual effects and many more. I have also found that, compared to The Vampire Diaries, Mockingjay part 1 only has 5 people who are involved in producer roles. This is probably because a TV series is an on going event which means that a lot more producers are needed, compared to one large scale movie. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1951265/fullcredits/ - accessed: 16th October 2014 – authored by: IMDB)
A producer’s job, for both TV and film, look after the business side of the production, leaving the director and crew to concentrate of the actual creation of a series or film. The job also includes; pitching new ideas for projects, securing funding and rights for books and screenplays, and also managing budgets. The skills needed for this specific job role are that a producer will need to be well organised, good with numbers and an excellent negotiator with clientele, especially. Also, to become a producer, you will need experience of working in the industry and a good network of contacts, which are also found within the medias industry. The cost of hiring a producer is wide-range, depending on the contract details and percentage of profits they will receive from the feature film or TV show. The working hours can be long and irregular linking to the demand of the film/TV series which means that the availability of the producer can’t be known for sure (https://nationalcareersservice.direct.gov.uk/advice/planning/jobprofiles/Pages/tvorfilmproducer.aspx - accessed: 16th October 2014 – authored by: National Careers Service)
A director’s job, for both TV and film, is that they have general responsibility for the way films or television programmes are made. As a director, you would use your creativity, organisational skills and technical knowledge to control the entire production process. For this specific job role you will need incredibly good communication skills as well as, being very organised and good at
planning. You would also need to be good at time keeping and keeping to your budget. Experience wise, many people start off in the industry but doing something different such as a ‘runner’ where you can build yourself up in the industry until you reach your directing goal. The availability needed for this job role is again, wider ranged as the working hours are often irregular and long hours relating to the production’s needs, which also means that they can also include evenings and weekends. The pay is, again, widely ranged depending on the contract agreements and the overall budget available for the film or TV show. (https://nationalcareersservice.direct.gov.uk/advice/planning/jobprofiles/Pages/tvorfilmdirector.aspx - accessed: 16th October 2014 – authored by: National Careers Service)
A scriptwriter is responsible for creating the idea for a script and taking part in research to get information for a movie or television show. For example, they may need to research a specific location or occupation to include in the script. A script is also very rarely written entirely by one scriptwriter. Usually, other writers work with the scriptwriter to produce the completed script. Employers, look for experience in on-the-job training and jobs with film production companies and television stations. Key skills needed to become a scriptwriter include writing and creativity. They must also be able to create new storylines and characters that will interest film production companies and television stations. Scriptwriters need to be persistent, as many projects take several years to produce, as well as needing to have good communication skills. For availability, scriptwriters tend to make their own work schedule that suits them, as most people, specifically freelance scriptwriters, choose to work from home but also, depending on the project. The cost to hire a scriptwriter is similar to the other pre-production based roles, it depends on the given contract. (http://everydaylife.globalpost.com/career-description-script-writer-11053.html - accessed: 16th October 2014 – authored by: Dachell McSween, Demand Media)
A video editor job role is to bring together pictures and sound to produce a piece for a film or television show that is therefore ready to shown on screen. For this specific job role you will need to have skills in creativity, management of timing, patience and the ability to meet deadlines. Experience is looked at more by employers than qualifications and you can find experience through voluntary
work, working for equipment hire companies or even being a ‘runner’. The availability needed depends on the production you are working on, but it is possible that you can work average office hours, unless editing suites are booked in the evenings. It is also possible that you work flexible hours and work at short notice if necessary. Although, working hours can progress up to 50 to 60 hours a week. A video editor is paid approximately £18,000 a year but those with experience can earn from £20,000 to £35,000 a year. (https://nationalcareersservice.direct.gov.uk/advice/planning/jobprofiles/Pages/videoeditor.aspx - accessed: 16th October 2014 – authored by: National Careers Service)
Resourcing is also an important part of the personnel section of pre-production. Resourcing is basically gathering all of the materials, money and people needed for the particular project to be successful. This is the job which the producer usually would take part in, as it is the main things which are needed for the project to go ahead. Resourcing is also probably the part of production, which takes the longest amount of time as it includes gaining the money to help find crew, actors, equipment and facility hires. (http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/resourcing - accessed: 23rd October 2014 – authored by: MacMillan Dictionary)
The media industry is very competitive which means that your CV should be of high quality and the only thing that counts in your CV is the content, not how it looks. Here’s an example:
I am going to explain 3 different ways of funding in the media industry, which will include: the BBC, commercial funding and independent funding.
BBCThe BBC Media Action received £40 million in the year to 31st
March 2013. The main source of funding was grants receivable from international bilateral donors and this money then made it possible for the BBC to work on 81 projects worldwide. During the years 2012/2013 the largest donor was the British Government’s Department for International Development (DFID), which supported a number of projects, even those where BBC Media Action was just the junior partner. The pie chart I have used shows the number of different companies which support (fund) the BBC Media Action, as well showing you how much that specific company has donated to them. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaaction/about/finance - accessed: 16th October 2014 – Authored by: BBC)
Equipment, transport, crew, facility hire and materials are all key things that are needed in a TV series or short film and all cost money which means that they are all involved in the funding for a particular BBC project. These funding’s are all found within the companies which support the BBC and therefore pay for the necessities which are needed to make a feature film or TV series.
Commercial Funding:Commercial funding is basically what it says in the title, funding of a feature film or TV series using advertising. The companies, which mainly use sponsors and advertisement as their funding, are called ‘Commercial Broadcasters’. These broadcasters are also sponsored by share holders who don’t actually worry about the
content of the TV show or feature film, as long as the sponsored advertisements are shown and are given their money then they are happy. The main TV channels, which are commercial broadcasters, are: ITV, C4 and Five all of which are funded from adverts. All three of these channels have quite an expensive deal as part of their licences to broadcast. It is likely that ITV and Five will not be commercial broadcasters for much longer as they are running out of money although, C4 is slightly different as it is owned by the government.Sky is also a commercial broadcaster but does not face the same problems as ITV, Five and C4 because the channel also has money from the subscriptions it gains from people and also because it does not have any public service obligations. (https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100901083659AAl2kze - accessed: 16th October 2014 – authored by: Bob)
Independent Funding:Independent funding is used when independent films are made. Independent films differ from the typical type of film because they are created outside the major film studio system (e.g. Hollywood). (http://www.raindance.org/what-is-independent-film/ - accessed: 16th October 2014 – authored by: Elliot Grove) An example of an independent funding company is ‘BFI Film Forever’ who has something called a Distribution Fund, which invests in increasing access to high quality British independent and specialised films in order to boost audience choice and to enrich film culture UK-wide.
Materials:Un-sourced materials may be challenged and the removed from the pre-production stage which is why the production team to be thorough when searching through materials.
In pre-production, there are many different types of materials used to gain more information for your upcoming projects. For example, for The Vampire Diaries, the production team would have to use materials such as: books, the Internet and possibly in journals to find more information on the mythology side of the show so they can get their details and knowledge as close as it can to reality. They probably even visited universities to interview people who are specialists in the mythological side of the show, which will therefore give them a larger scale of materials available to them
and make their information more accurate and more interesting to the audience.
The first type of material I am going to explain is ‘archive and library materials’. An archive is a gathering of historical records, or the physical place they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have been gathered over the course of an individual or organisation’s lifetime, and are kept to show the function of that person or organisation. For any TV or film company, archives are key in collecting accurate data/ information for their project. Especially if their project is documentary based and has to include true facts and cannot contain anything that might possibly be rumours or anything that is close to untrue, which then means that they’ll have to get a second opinion on the knowledge they find in the archives so they know for sure that it’s completely true. (http://en.wikipedia.org.wiki/Archive - accessed: 20th October 2014 – authored by: Wikipedia)
Materials from the library are print, non-print or equipment, which are, available to all teachers and students, are few in numbers and has many users. They are also used exclusively in the library media centres. Library media materials are shelved with other liked materials. (http://www.cobbk12.org/librarymedia/Policy/Definition/Definition.pdf - accessed: 20th October 2014 – authored by: Library Media Education)
The next type of material I am going to talk about is costumes. It’s basic knowledge that every movie and TV show needs costumes for their production to go ahead. In The Vampire Diaries they have certain episodes which are set in the past,
sometimes 1000 years ago so, the production team need to find costumes which are appropriate for the different time changes and stay as true to reality as possible. For the
1800s styled clothing the costume designer, Leigh Leverett, said that she does a lot of research on the Internet, first, and then focuses her research on region, the south in the 1860s and finally on what the women were wearing in the south during the Civil War. She designed most of the ball gowns shown in the show herself, from scratch, and the background building and settings she found from the costume houses which the show has in L.A, she then builds some herself and also rents some. The system of making 1860s styled costumes also involves are lot of shopping so Leverett can find the appropriate materials and fabrics. All of this information proves that costume designing is key in pre-production as, for a TV show, there is a new episode shot every week so a lot of the designers time is taken up shopping, designing and then creating all of the different era clothes but, the costumes are also key in pulling the entire series together and enables the production team to include enhanced flashbacks, therefore making the show more interesting and bewildering for the audience with the sight of how people used to dress and how the world look 200-1000 years ago. (http://www.wetpaint.com/vampire-diaries/articles/interview-tvd-costume-designer-spills-on-vampire-style - accessed: 23rd October 2014 – authored by: Kim Kaufman)
The next type of material I am going to talk about is graphics. For one series of movies in particular, graphics are key to wrapping the whole series together and making it look more advanced. The Hunger Games series needs a lot of graphics, mainly because it is set in a dystopian future, which means that the graphic designers, Berlin Unit, need to work hard. Because the series is set in the future, everything has to be advanced, from the planes to the buildings. In these movies they have hovercrafts, an enhanced control room and something called the cornucopia, neither of these things could be possible without the graphic designers, whom design and create these objects technologically, using a computer and special type of graphics software, for example, Adobe CS6 Design. For the first movie, one person in particular was asked to create the control room scenes, Paul Beaudry, he started with redesigning every interface which was going to be in the Control Room and then the central hologram. This took them the first few weeks on production to design. Beaudry worked alongside
the 3D and Compositing teams at Hybride to create several different ideas before finally coming up with the finished thing. The team also used After Effects to help finish off the small details of the interfaces such as the curved style interfaces with the help of ‘Fusionist’ Ben Myers who worked out a hand-tracking solution that allowed Beaudry to easily animate for hand and camera movement within After Effects and Cinema 4D. Because he was the only designer on the production team, they had a limited amount of time to complete a large number of shots, this information alone suggests that in reality, film production teams should have more than one graphic designer who can help complete the designs in a small amount of time, giving them more time to complete all the shots without worrying about the time frame left. Beaudry used Cinema 4D’s ‘Mograph’ to create the bits of data flowing on the screens as well as for the health monitor panels, like the heartbeat and brain scan windows seen throughout the Control Panel scenes. All of this information also shows how much time is consumed during the graphic designing and creating, it also shows how many people are needed to actually create all of the graphics, just for one specific scene which is shown throughout the movie and can also suggest how many graphic creators there are within the production team for the entire movie. Proving that the graphics are a huge chunk of materials, which are needed and necessary if the movie/ TV series is to be a success. (http://www.paul-beaudry.com/The-Hunger-Games - accessed: 23rd October 2014 – authored by: Paul Beaudry)
Contributors:
All sorts of contributors are needed for the production of a movie or TV series, from specialists, stunt men and sometimes even the public. When making a film or TV series, the production team have to make sure that all the contributors, who will be in the film, sign a release form which gives the producers the right to use their performances in their film and in the related marketing (trailers, advertisements, movie posters). Although, release forms aren’t necessary for those who appear as part of a crowd scene or if their located in the background of their film. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/filmnetwork/filmmaking/guide/production/legal-guide-production-agreements - accessed: 23rd October 2014 – authored by: BBC)
In a TV show called ‘Tricked’ a magician asks the general public to assist him with a trick and then show them one himself. These small interviews are included in the show every week and afterwards, the people chosen reveal what they thought of the trick. This is an example of contribution because their assistance and comments on what they have just witnessed, helps build the show into what it is and also gets the viewers more convinced that the tricks ‘Ben Hanlin’ does are in fact real. The fact that they choose members of the general public at random helps emphasize this.
Another show called ‘Game Of Thrones’ also gives an example of contribution. In this highly successful TV series, there are many sword fighting and normal fighting scenes and for all of these, stuntmen are experts who are needed so the actors don’t get hurt during these dangerous stunts. Stuntmen are needed so the scenes look realistic but also so nobody gets hurt at the same time, although it isn’t definite that the stuntmen won’t get hurt, at the very least, they all know exactly what they’re doing and there will therefore be a less chance of the seriously injuring each other or themselves. (http://www.iftn.ie/news/?act1=record&only=1&aid=73&rid=4286666&tpl=archnews&force=1 - accessed: 23rd October 2014 – authored by: Kevin Cronin)
Another example of contribution could also be The Vampire Diaries. Because the show is based mainly on myths and legends, they most likely have people, such as professors from certain universities, who specialise in mythology and legends to help the screenwriters and producers keep the show as true as possible with as much detail as possible. It is also likely that without these peoples help; the show won’t have as many interesting facts and such a large range of species (vampires, werewolves, hybrids, witches, originals). A lot of myths and legends are also discussed and questioned in the episodes themselves and it’s clear that the information had to come from somewhere, that is where the specialists come into the production and how they help the writers to include the details of the myths and legends in their writing with as much detail and realism as possible.
The Vampire Diaries IMDB full cast and crew (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1405406/fullcredits/ - accessed: 16th October 2014 – Authored by ‘IMDB’)
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 IMDB full cast and crew (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1951265/fullcredits/ - accessed: 16th October 2014 – authored by: IMDB)
Producer job description (https://nationalcareersservice.direct.gov.uk/advice/planning/jobprofiles/Pages/tvorfilmproducer.aspx - accessed: 16th October 2014 – authored by: National Careers Service)
Director job description (https://nationalcareersservice.direct.gov.uk/advice/planning/jobprofiles/Pages/tvorfilmdirector.aspx - accessed: 16th October 2014 – authored by: National Careers Service)
Games Of Thrones director on stuntmen fighting scenes (http://www.iftn.ie/news/?act1=record&only=1&aid=73&rid=4286666&tpl=archnews&force=1 - accessed: 23rd October 2014 – authored by: Kevin Cronin)
