The Pre-Production Process

For this sequence, I had to make an entry to the “DepicT!” competition, I worked with two other students, Joshua Grace and Craig Francis. On the DepicT website, it says, “DepicT! Challenges filmmakers on any budget from anywhere in the world to show their stuff in just a minute and a half”, so that’s exactly what we’ve done. We have also posted it on YouTube on the ENBTECMEDIA YouTube channel as a form of distribution, you can also find it at the top of this post.

Our short film is about my character, Toby, it begins with Toby and his dad arguing in the car about Toby not concentrating or putting any effort into his studying, Toby then gets out of the car in an angry state and walks away. As the car drives off, Toby gets a text and as he’s checking it, he gets hit by a car. He is then taken away into this half dead dream world where he meets this character who is explain to Toby about how he is going to die. Throughout this scene of the sequence there are a bunch of clocks in the room, you can hear clocks ticking at different times, this adds quite a lot of tension. There is a banging on one of the doors, it then flicks back to reality where Toby’s dad is banging on his chest saying, “Come back to me Toby! Toby, it’s not your time!”, we then see Toby come back to life and take a deep gasp of air for the final shot.

At first, we struggled to get the ideas flowing when trying to come up with a storyline, but then we came up with the idea of basing our idea around the basis of time, this is because Joshua was saying about how his parents own a clock shop, we also came up with the title “emiT” because it is just time spelt backwards. After a couple hours of brain storming and talking we had our entire sequence planned out in our head, we then just needed to get the preproduction work done. The preproduction work included a location recce, a location recce is a collection of pictures and ideas of the location you would like to film, this is so you can fully visualise your sequence and so you know what you’re working with. We also needed as prop and costume list, a production schedule, releases for both the location and for the talents. A location release is a signed piece of paper by the owner/s of the land, giving permission to film there, and a talent release is like a contract with anyone who was in the sequence, giving their permission to be used in the sequence. We completed a storyboard and a shot list, there reason we done this was so that we had something to follow when filming, almost like a step-by-step guide. In the storyboard and our initial idea, we were going to have Toby arguing with his mum, but when it came to filming, we could get hold of our mum character or anyone to replace her, so what we had to do was use Joshua’s dad as the mum character and just changed it slightly to suit the circumstances. We also had to complete a risk assessment, a risk assessment is a form where you evaluate all the potential risk that may occur throughout the whole process, which should reduce the risks because they either be sorted by the time filming comes around or they will be made known so they are avoided as much as possible. This gives money to the producers and big companies which funds their next productions. Another good example is the BBC, they constantly have different productions on TV which funds them in both the long term and the short term to create, and carry on creating them. Other sources of finance include factoring, this is where films go out to sell their invoices to banks, which is a quick way to get money.

The only requirements for my production, which means what I had to spend money on, was some fake blood for the scenes where Toby has blood on his face to make it look like he had been hit by car. Other productions spend anything from “not spending any money” to “$378.5 million” which is how much it cost to make Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, or “$623 million” like the Hobbit trilogy. For our production, other than the fake blood, the rest of the equipment was already to hand, we just had to borrow it from the college. Higher budget films will have a much larger list of resources and tend to spend more money, for example a more animated film, such as Avatar, would need to spend more money on special effects and editing, because most of the time spent on the movie will be editing it and trying to make everything look as realistic as possible. Whereas a film like The Expendables would have to spend more money on props, special effects, and maybe even their cast.

There are more people involved with the creation of the programs and movies you watch, within a media team you normally get the talent (the actors) and the crew (the production team). In a low budget short, the crew only needs to be small, and they’re not even that likely to get paid for it. Most small productions make next to nothing on their projects, which is also some of the reason that the team is small, if the team was bigger than even if they did make money off their production then it’d have to be split so it would be much after it’s split between everyone. if the production is on a low budget, then they will need to get a low budget director, costumes, props, maybe used some of the thing they have at home to save even more money. Television programmes are slightly different, because they will have a much larger budget, they will be able to put more money towards a director, props and costumes. A television is much more likely to spend money on a makeup artist for their production, this is because they will want their actors to look as good as possible on camera. The team for a television programme is probably going to consist of a director (who will be doing a bunch of other jobs at the same time), makeup artists, researchers, writers and head writers, etc. A Hollywood feature film is more likely to have a crew with people there just in case they need them instead of only spending money on the things that they really need to. The film “The Titanic” is an American romantic disaster film which had a budget of $200 million dollars. There were so many different directors and actors working on this, and by the end of it had been nominated for fourteen academy awards. Our crew was only the three of us, but the actors were Me, Joshua’s dad, Joshua’s mum, and Jimmy… so yeah, our team was small compared to “Iron Man 3” which had 3,310 crew members. Because there was only three of us in the crew, we had to allocate the work evenly between us, but as most of the preproduction work was done at college we could do it as a team. For example, we all worked on the storyboards as a group in lesson, but as only Joshua lives near the location where we were shooting he had to do the location recce, but the things that we could do together, we did. We all took turns editing and we all had a say of what should go in and what shouldn’t, reviewing it as a group as we went along. Unfortunately, because I was playing on of the characters in this one I was not able to get very involved with the filming side of this production, but I still watched the clips back with Joshua and Craig, or if I thought that I could have done something better, like be more physically or deliver a line to a greater standard, then we would retake the shot. Joshua, Craig and I have all worked as a group together before so we found it very easy to get along and carried out our roles well. The only other people I can really thank for helping with our production is Sean Offord and Joshua Trett, my film studies teachers, they would often make sure that everything is going well and if we had any troubles they would solve them for us, but they would lead us in the right direction which let us learn how to fix our own problems.

Almost one hundred percent of the equipment that we used for this production was provided to us from the college, for example, we had to borrow a tripod, slider (another tripod), camera, and way more. We also borrowed a neutral density filter. A neutral density filter is a filter for your camera lens that absorbs all some of the light, causing the images and videos look like they were set more at night time. We didn’t end up using this in the end because it was already dark when we were filming to the street shots and when in the room with Jimmy, there was no need for it. There are loads of ways of acquiring equipment for a production, a good way is to look online and see if there are any websites that can provide you with what you need. “Hire a Camera.com” (http://www.hireacamera.com/index.asp) is a small online business which allows you to hire a camera, they have different sizes and different types that can fit anyone’s needs.

A location release is a contracting between the photographer, or videographer, and the owner of the private land giving their permission for them to film there. These are important because without a signed location release, even if the owner of the land says that it’s okay at the time, if they change their mind and decide to take legal action it could be seen as trespassing and filming on private property as they have no proof of them saying that it was okay. Like I said before, Joshua lives near the location where we were shooting he had to do the location recce, but what a location recce is a collection of pictures and ideas of the location you would like to film, this is so you can fully visualise your sequence and so you know what you’re working with. One of the locations that we used was a road outside the back of Joshua’s house, this was for the opening scene, the banging on chest scene (at 1:15), and the closing scene where Toby comes back to life. The other location, known as “the hut”, is owned by Karen Read, the manager of the Seagull Theatre. This location was a small empty room with a table, two chairs, and a few shelving units inside (which we lined with clocks to add to the mise-en-scene). Because of how empty the room was, there was an echo and the floor is wood so you can hear footsteps incredibly easily. This made it very difficult when filming because if you weren’t in the scene you had to stand still, because the slightest sound would get picked up by the cameras microphone. The only real risk is that outside of this room are a set of very steep stairs, so to avoid anyone obtaining any injuries we made sure to be extra careful on them.

There are many different materials that are needed for production, other than equipment, crew and cast, for example we also had to use props, a script, original footage (the shots we got), music, sound effects, concepts, ideas, insurance and creative commons copyright, or more commonly known as just CC. A CC license is used when an author or creator wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon something that they have created, but by no means are they allowed to claim that work as their own, if they do claim it to be their own then this is plagiarism and could result with a fun little trip to the court. We were slightly affected by copy right when editing our production, this is because we want to put a song on the radio in post for the opening scene, but we had to use royalty free music, this is all because of copyright. The reason that we had to used royalty free music is because most songs that are created by a musician or band are almost always copyrighted, and because none of us own any songs we had to just make do with what we had. We got our royalty free music from incompetech.com (http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/). Clearance is where you gain permission film on a specific location. The way you get this permission is by getting the owner to sign a location release, like we had to do for the hut of the scenes with Jimmy. Public liability insurance is insurance which covers the cost of legal and compensation claims made against you. Fortunately, we are covered by the college’s public liability insurance, but if someone who wasn’t at college wanted to make a project and were not part of a college or anything that would cover you, you’d have to go out and sort this out yourself. There are a few ways you could go about this, but the best is to do it online, as its both quick and relatively easy. Public liability insurance covers specified loss, damage or illness, or even in some cases death, in return you would get compensation, which isn’t really a good trade if you ask me. Another type of insurance is the completion guarantee, this is often used to guarantee that the producer will complete and deliver the film on time. If they were to not complete their production in time, then the completion guarantee company can take over and get rid of, or hire, whoever they want, all they care about is getting it finished, no matter what the quality is (to an extent).

A Regulatory body is a public authority or government agency responsible for using their authority over some area of human activity, in this case the human activity is making a moving picture production. The OFCOM is the regulator of TV, radio, fixed-line telecoms, mobiles, postal services, plus the airwaves over which wireless devices operate. What this means is that they are the people who keep a close eye on everything everyone does within the media world. The BBC is not regulated by OFCOM, they’re regulated by the BBC Trust. The BBC Trust is the governing body of the BBC, they are operationally independent of the BBC management, this means that they are not controlled by the managers of the BBC, which is good because they were, then they could just make it look like the BBC is being externally regulated, when in fact they are just doing it themselves. The British Board of Film classification, more commonly known as the BBFC, is an independent, non-government body, which classifies movies, videos and computer games. What that means is that the BBFC are the people who get to decide who can watch what, they decide what age rating movies, videos and computer games are. The ratings range from U (for universal) up to 18 (for people 18 and over). If I had to give my DepicT! project an age rating, I would probably give it an age rating of 12, this is because the character Toby gets hit by a car and has blood on his face later, which isn’t too gory, but younger viewers may be off put by the blood.

Trade unions are an organised association of workers in a trade, group of trades, or profession, formed to protect and further their rights and interests. What this means is that trade unions are a voice for the workers, promoting better paid leave and maternity, an allows the workers to speak to the managers. PACT (Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television) Is the UK trade association for independent content producers in feature film, television, animation, children’s and digital media. Whereas BECTU (the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph and Theatre Union) is a trade union in the UK, which has around 25,000 members who work in broadcasting, film, theatre, entertainment, leisure and interactive media. What these two trade unions do is listen to what you have to say to try and improve your working experience and will try to resolve the problems you have. But they don’t deal with things like a broken coffee machine in the office, they’re more concerned about corruption within a business, or in our case, a filming production.