Pre-Production Process

The Pre-Production Process

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Type of moving image production (media forms)

For the first graded task for Television and Film Production, we first watched a few 90 second videos in class on the depict website to get a rough idea of the challenge we were going to get given to us later. This website is to “challenge filmmakers to create a 90 second ultra-short masterpiece” its primary focus is to help to uncover emerging filmmakers all over the world, which shows originality, imagination and the ability to engage in just a minute and a half. After we watched a couple of short films, we got set the task of creating our own 90 second short film in four weeks. We were given a low budget and had to create an outstanding piece of film. Your film could have been any genre from; horror to comedy. The class first got teamed up randomly into groups of four. After the groups were decided we first started to brain storm some ideas independently. Eventually, we concluded having a story of a boy that bullied his classmates on school grounds and he would come home one evening to find out he’s invisible to the world. We distributed it onto the colleges YouTube channel and onto the depict website.

[IGNORE] We started planning out the task ahead of us by using a story board, after we drew our short film onto the storyboard we were left stuck due to it taking up our too much time, due to the lack of communication and that he all focussed on the story board. We went back to the drawing board and decided to scrap that idea. We thought of having the main protagonist find out he’s invisible one day and fix it with a few google searches, this ended up giving us a fresh start, so we worked on different areas when planning. When coming up with the new idea we made sure that we stayed in one location (college) during the filming where we had to sign out location releases to allow us to film around the college and had to and to have no props or costumes, so we didn’t have to pay for anything during the making of the short film. We recreated the shot list for the new idea as the first one came out to be 30 shots, cutting it down to 20 shots, we did this due to being so far behind on all the other groups. On the risk assessment we talked about everything from people tripping over equipment when filming to having more than one person carry the equipment when moving around the college, doing all of this led to us catching up to the other groups and we started to film.

On top of our short film, there are a load more moving image productions to help give the business more variety other types of moving image media production are: live action, animated film, feature length, narrative, documentary.  One of the most crucial tasks of film is distributing it out to an audience, it can make or break if you’re going to get a profit in your film or a complete failure. When distributing you get a wide range of options to choose from: Cinemas, Blu-ray disc, DVD-video, direct-to-video, film distributor.

Finance and sources of funding

Financing a film is one of the aspects of film production that occurs during the development stage prior to pre-production. responsible for funding the film until it goes over budget, this is where the producer will go to a bank and take the contract and get a loan. Another new way of funding smaller film industry is from the Corporations, where it supports standalone film makers and this can include projects that have the potential and can create profit for both the producers and the corporations that are helping fund the film.

Requirements

Spending money to produce a high quality film can cost anything from a couple thousand for low budget films to the millions for Hollywood blockbuster movies, money can get spent very easily so its very crucial to spend it wisely so you don’t go over budget and also so you can make more of  a profit. The major requirements for funding are camera equipment, computer-generated imagery (CGI), Special effects, Lighting, Props, Costumes, Crew, Actors, Producers, Marketing.  An example of where you will spend your money is on the story rights which can cost from a couple thousand (e.g. Leaving Las Vegas) to over $10 million (e.g. the video game Halo). The reason buying off story rights is to prevent legal issues from copyright for the popular video game Halo. The price also may vary due to how popular name is, it can be a famous book or a remake. Another example is the cast, the bulk of the group usually get paid around $2-3,000 per week, famous actors (e.g. The Rock) can demand fees up to $30 million per film. Tactics smaller budget films take are avoiding location filming in famous or commercial areas, using unknown, non-famous actors and Eliminating night scenes.

Due to the low budget cost of our short film we obtained: the location we chose was inside out college due to us not having to pay any extra cost to film, the camera equipment was supplied by the college, the actors we had were the people inside of our group with little acting experience, we got cheap props found around the school that they supplied us to help us immerse the audience, we edited on a school computer where the college provided us a high quality editing software where we cut down our clips and put them all together. Also, when we were creating our low budget film, we had to take on a lot of roles due to the size of our group compared to mainstream films. During the planning process we all took up 2-3 roles.

Personnel

In a moving image production, you must have actors to help drive the film and a production team to help sell and film, A. the low budget short means there are going to be few crew members and actors due to cost savings. Due to it being a low budget film there is going to be few special effects during the editing process to keep costs low leaving the production team being much lower as well. B. a television programme has no actors involved instead they have narrators talking over the cinematic shots being shown also the narrator is usually isn’t in frame of the shot. The crew mainly revolves around producers and camera crew to help film cinematic shots for the audience. C. Hollywood feature films has the highest budget between all three. Because they have a high budget they can use high quality CGI/special effects to help the film feel more immersive for the audience, it is also very big actors to help with the film in many ways (very good at acting and also can help drive sales due to their popularity) and crew members due to the large-scale action scenes that happens in these films.

When we were creating our low budget short film, we had to take on a lot of roles due to the size of our group compared to mainstream films. During the planning process we all took up 2-3 roles to complete the entire planning process in 1 week because we had to restart everything on the first week of planning. When it came to film, we set ourselves a role that we had the most experience in compared to everyone else inside our group. Our camera man had the most experience because he is taking photography, so he was able to set up the camera with the correct settings and filmed interesting shots. I took on the role of holding the shotgun microphone as you didn’t need to have any experience and all my other members had chosen their roles before. When it came to choosing the actor in our group we just chose the most confident person to make the film feel more authentic.

Typically, when describing a film whether it’s to your friends or to a group asking some questions, you don’t usually talk about these people. A distributor is responsible to help market the film, it’s a very important part of the financing process of a film. The distributor manages things like release dates, help make the film go into cinemas or you can only watch it on your latest smart tv. Another big contributor to films that like to talk about something that was real in the past and can share their real-life experiences with these things for example having a witness/survivor of the titanic before and after it sank in the ocean. Due to it sinking in the middle of no where there can only be stories told by the people that were on board that chilly night.

Time

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Yes, we did meet our deadline, but it was produced very poorly due to lack of teamwork and effort from our group in total. We came into a lot of problems for example that we had to scrap our first idea due to how difficult it was to create which took 1 week of our 4 weeks, this led to us rushing the planning process. We then had 1-2 lessons of filming because we didn’t pre book the equipment we need to film on those days. Finally, me and one of our colleagues went for a holiday for the last week before we had to hand in our project.

Equipment/Facilities

We obtained all out equipment to shoot our depict film was provided by the college, we used our student card to get our: camera, tripod, shotgun microphone, etc. However, we had to buy our own SSD to store our videos/photos onto it.

The equipment we used to shoot the short film was a camera, tripod, shotgun microphone, shotgun arm, wires, headphones, and an amp reader. All the equipment was funded by the college. After we got the equipment and were ready to film, we first set some roles, I was working on holding the shotgun microphone, Harvey was behind the camera as he had previous experience with photography for one of his options in the college and [add more]

Locations

A location recces is production term which refers to a pre-filming visit to a location to determine its suitability for shooting videos/pictures (commonly carried out by the director of photography), including access to necessary facilities and assessment of any potential lighting and sound problem, and is closely related to location scouting. Location recces is an essential part of planning, it can help deviate if you have the best budget to film there and can help plan your script and filming schedule.

A location release is a binding contract between the photographer and the owner of a private property whereby the owner of the property grants written permission to shoot a movie, video, commercial, photography.

When creating our depict project we first chose very private areas (homes, public parks), this is the main reason why we switched to having a short film around college grounds where we could deal with less paper work and fees from filming in public areas. For the second idea we decided to use the disabled toilets in the college, hallways and our tv and film room to create our depict project. We printed out some location releases and signed out a form with the college to allow us to film in those 3 spots.

When creating any type of media production a crew is vital as it can help speed up the process of production, help bring in new talents to film/act, some more talents that crews have are camera men, special effects teams, and also costume designers. These teams can help bring movies to life as they will have skills that the producer wouldn’t have been able to do on his own. When creating documentaries or true films its very helpful having a witness or a victim during the action as it can give the producers an idea of how they can portray the film to an audience and also to make the film feel as authentic as possible. A very good example of this is from the movie “Titanic”, a very tragic accident leaving in thousands of deaths and hundreds of stories that will scar the victims that survived the horrific night that will stick with them forever. Another fantastic movie/book that turned out to be a true story is “127 Hours”. This movie is about an adventurer who finds himself trapped under a boulder for five days leaving himself having to amputate his own arm in order to survive.

Materials

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Legal Issues

When creating a film, it is important to understand all the legal considerations, music is a very easy legal issue. If you don’t get the legal rights to a song it will provide a lot of issues financially due to copyright. Producers when implementing music into their films they usually pay for an original piece that lasts an hour, this costs up to 7 figures or they can pay for an existing song for around $300,000. Capturing your own footage and not using stock footage, if you have a low budget producers will try to cut costs and might use stock footage, a lot of the time it will have a copyright wall over it leading to more legal battles that could of easily been avoided.

Copyright – protects your work and stops others from using it without your permission. You get copyright protection automatically for free where you don’t need to apply for it. If you’re signed to a record label for example MGM, they will take ownership of your songs when signed with their contract. When signed with big brands they will give you extra protection on copyright: flagging down videos and demonetize youtubers videos and will give you all the revenue

You will automatically get copyright get protection when you create:

-          Original content for example: literary, dramatic, musical and artistic work, photography

-          Sound and music recordings

-          Film and television recordings

Copyright prevents people from:

-          Copying your work

-          Putting it on the internet

-          Distributing copies of it, whether free of charge or for sale

The length of copyright depends on the type of work you produced and put onto the internet, it lasts between 25-70 years, for films it lasts 70 years after the death of the director or screenplay author.

You can license your work if you own the copyright and can decide how the copyright is decided. You can also sell or transfer your copyright, this requires signing a document to show a sale or a transfer has been made.

If you want people to stop using your work, it’s your responsibility for defending it against infringement.

Now days nearly everything has some sort of trademark over its brand/name, this really made it very difficult for us to not use things like stock footage, copyrighted songs, etc. The big problem came to editing the film down into a finished piece where we were advised to get use some music in the background of our video. The college gave us a website where we can use a lot of songs that wont flag our video if it goes up on YouTube or any other platform. This was done by paying a yearly fee to get copyrighted songs to not flag up our videos.

Clearance – is the process of acquiring permission for all aspects of a film production. The necessary clearances can include sets, actors/extras, music, stock film, art, posters, etc. Film clearance is necessary to avoid liability, acquire E/O insurance, and avoid any general copyright/trademark issues.

Public Liability Insurance – it is required to get a license or permit to film in a public area, if you do not get a filming permit/license from the owner of the location then you can be at very high risk of legal battles. However, you can take photos in public without any permission. usually.

Completion guarantee/insurance – the producers of that media product will complete and deliver a finished film in keeping with the screenplay, budget and production schedule that the bank or financiers approved.

Regulation

OFCOM – is the UK government-approved regulator for the communications services that we use and rely on each day. They make sure that people get the best broadband, home phone and mobile services, and keeps a close eye on TV and radio.

The Office of Communications (OFCOM) is the UK’s broadcasting, telecommunications and postal regulatory body. It became the BBC’s first external regulator in 2017. The principal functions of OFCOM are relation to the BBC are to:

-          Determine appropriate measures to assess the performance of the BBC’s UK Public Services

-          Regulate the content standards of the BBC’s television, radio and on-demand programmes, in accordance with OFCOM’s Standards and fairness codes.

OFCOM is the regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries. It regulates the TV and radio sectors, fixed line telecoms, and many more.

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) is an independent regulator and guide with over 100 years of experience. Their purpose is to help everyone in the UK choose age-appropriate films, videos and websites. The BBFC is completely independent and is also a non-profit organization, which means their fees are designed only to cover their costs.

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Trade unions and trade associations

Trade union – is an organisation with members who are usually workers or employees. It looks after their interests at work by doing things like:

-          Negotiating agreements with employers on pay and conditions

-          Discussing big changes like large scale redundancy

-          Discussing members’ concerns with employers

-          Going with members to disciplinary and grievance meetings

Trade unions play an essential role in democratic societies. They provide services to members, including legal services, they also represent their members in their dealings with employers.

PACT is a trade association representing the commercial interests of UK independent television, film, digital, children’s and animation media companies. They support its members with legal and business affairs advice and support, as well a wide range of services and campaign work. BETCU is trade union for creative ambition, they advise, defend and support members if they have a problem at work. They can help with things like negotiation pay and conditions with employers, offer valuable benefits and services and more. Both campaigns help shape the world if that’s people for BETCU or the environment for PACT.

Trade association – is to set laws and provide extensive knowledge to companies within the industry, they are non-profit organizations whose primary purpose is to provide different learning tools for businesses in particular industry.