Project Management in the Film Industry

Event Report

Aidan Boulter of the Guild of British Camera Technicians is a visiting lecturer at the National Film School. Aidan gave a very entertaining and visually stimulating walk-through of how a film or TV drama episode is planned and filmed, including any required special effects.

A film project goes through the same stages as an IT-enabled business change project, and IT plays a different role at each stage. Any film requires:

• an Executive Producer controlling the chequebook;
• a Producer furnishing the idea, financing and arranging the deals;
• a Director to control the ‘Art’;
• a Completion Bondsman as the finance guarantor;
• a Line Producer who is the Project Manager;
• a Production Manager controlling day to day budgeting and accounting;
• a First Assistant Director managing the set and shooting schedule;
• and a Script Supervisor to ensure continuity and doing the reporting.

When using real film the Script Supervisor is also charged with ensuing there is no film wastage, since film comes in 400 ft (7 minutes running time) or 1000 ft (10 mins) cans, about 10 cans are used per day at around £160 per can, so with scenes shorter than 7 mins it is essential that the “short-end can” is used for other short scenes. While talking about the dramatic impact advanced technology digital cameras and post-production have made on traditional shooting schedules, Aidan explained how the “lighting” of a scene is now easily done. For example, telling the IT-digital-controller that the scene should be lit as “4 pm in November” would automatically produce the long shadows and the correct direction of lighting, even though the scene was being shot at noon on a bright sunny day in June; the impact in reducing shooting schedules, elapsed time and cost of a project is immediately obvious.

Progressing onwards to scheduling Aidan explained the benefits of the latest film industry standard scheduling software, shooting schedules that used to take 2 weeks to manually plan using scene card strips being moved around on a vast office wall now only take 30 seconds to plan using the Excel-like scene sorting/selection scheduling software. The resulting Shooting Calendar is optimised for the availability of actors, crew, location, props and most importantly elapsed time. This with the addition of the computerisation of special effects has meant that British film makers can now make films that go straight to DVD circulation after only showing in a few cinemas or even no showings at all. The film “Shooters” was only showed in 12 cinemas before selling well as a DVD. Aidan went on to briefly explain the impact of budgeting software, then onto how “pre-visualisation computer generated images” are used to decide how the film will be planned and shot. There was a video clip of Steven Spielberg explaining how he could pre-visualise and show the camera staff how he wanted the scene shot, and the output from the application could drive the positioning and moving of the camera, so that the scene could be re-shot many times with the same camera angles and traction each time allowing for re-takes solely on the basis of the acting in a scene.

Aidan entertained us with movie clips showing how special effects scene shooting is accomplished, giving examples from “Lord of the Rings Two Towers”, “Star Wars” and “Sin City”. The “Two Towers” used 1/72 scale miniatures, as well as all the other digital simulation and animation techniques. We were shown how crowd scenes can be realistically created by one person being shot in about 50 sequences (each being different), so that when the sequences are replicated hundreds of times and scattered throughout the scene space and scene time they give a realistic appearance of thousands of different individuals; whereas just replicating a single sequence would look just that, an easily recognisable single person replicated thousands of times. Aidan finished off with the dramatic changes digital technology and ISDN links between locations and studios had brought to viewing and editing the “daily rushes”.