Dec 1st

BrightSky’s Three Ps of Pre-Production

For anyone who wants to start out as a movie maker, the pre-production phase of their first feature film is possibly one of the most important steps of their career. This post examines the importance of having the right plot, the right people, and practicing the art of film making.

Pre-Production is arguably the most important stage in the making of a film. If you’re just starting out, then you’re probably at this stage right now. You might have a vague idea of what your film will be about and how you plan to shoot it, but nothing is certain at this point. This post will guide you through BrightSky’s three Ps of Pre-Production.

P#1. Plot

The plot is the reason you’re making a film in the first place. If you get everything else right, but the plot underwhelms, your movie won’t achieve its objective. Every clip of video that was ever recorded on any medium was made to tell a story. Sometimes the story was written in advance, like in a movie, but often, stories unfold and opportunistic film makers capture them through the lens. There should be something about this story that motivates you to retell it. Otherwise, how can you expect your audience to be motivated enough to sit through it?

Screenplay

In this post, we’ll assume you’ll be working from a screenplay. A screenplay is an unusual composition as it tries to describe through the written word what will eventually reach the audience through motion picture and audio. A screenplay is not like a novel where the author can describe vividly the internal motivations and emotions of a character. The camera only records action and dialogue, so internal traits need to be expressed in those terms. A screenplay isn’t like a stage play either. In a stage play, the action unfolds under the proscenium arch with the audience eavesdropping in constant wide-shot through the fourth wall. Sets are limited, as is the range of possible action, leaving most of the story to be told through dialogue. The motion picture, in its finished form, sits somewhere between the novel and the stage play. Even the most cash strapped film maker has access to a wide range of sets and a huge degree of control over what the audience’s eye is focused on. Understanding the difference between these different methods of story telling can help us avoid writing screenplays that contain useless information, such as over the top descriptions of a character’s feelings, or from boring the audience by using soliloquies where subtle cinematography can convey ten times more.

Structure – The Starter

“Think of any movie you enjoyed and ask yourself whether you cared about the main characters early on in the film.”With any method of story telling there is a need for structure. Stories need a beginning, a middle, and an end. Writers tend to conform to the same plot structure regardless of genre. On average, one page of screenplay will translate into one minute of screen time, so a 120 page screenplay (the Hollywood standard) is likely to produce a movie that’s two hours long. The first half hour (pages 1-30) is usually devoted to the setup. It establishes the relationship between the main characters and exposes traits that may be important for understanding a character’s actions later in the film. Given that most audiences decide (often unconsciously) whether they like a movie or not in the first ten minutes, and given that the first ten minutes is usually where the main characters are introduced, it’s crucial that the audience is made to care about them as early on as possible.

Structure – The Main Course

Plot Points
A plot point is any point in the story that dramatically alters the course of events.
Plot points overlap between the various sections of the screenplay.
The first one occurs between pages 25 and 30 between the setup and confrontation.
The second occurs between pages 85 and 90 where confrontation is becoming resolved.

The next hour (pages 30-90) is the essential confrontation of the movie. It describes a conflict between the main characters and their environment. It’s this conflict that drives the dramatic actions of the movie. Without it, you have no story. The drama in your movie will be built on creating characters that people care about and testing them through confrontation and conflicting motivations. Finally, the dramatic tensions are resolved – usually somewhere between pages 90 and 120. The resolution offers a satisfying solution to the drama. It’s not simply the ending, it’s everything that satisfies the intelligence and compassion of the audience – having already bared witness to the confrontation. One of the biggest challenges in screenplay writing is the transition between the parts. Most writers use plot points to achieve this.

Structure – The Tools

Back in the day of the typewriter, it was important that screenplay writers learned how to format their works properly. Today we have a range of software that will do this automatically. Celtx is a free application that formats your work into a proper screenplay and helps you to keep track of characters, crew actions, scheduling and a range of other production activities. It can be difficult to keep your train of thought while having to format your document properly, even within Celtx. Paul Murphy’s post on “Letting it Flow” can help anyone writing in any medium to get their ideas written down without becoming overly distracted with formatting or technical elements.

The most important task in pre-production is making sure that your crew understands the principals of telling a story through the medium of motion pictures. The second most important task is having the right crew.

P#2. People

people Chances are, like us, you don’t own a production company with lots of staff and a massive budget. If you want to make a movie of your own, you’ll need to fill a few key roles with good people that you can trust. We’ll assume you have a screenplay written, and you want to make a movie out of it. The first two people you’ll need are the Director and Producer.

The Big Boys: Director & Producer.The Director’s job is to interpret the screenplay into a vision that keeps the actors and crew working towards getting the right shots. The Producer is responsible for getting funding, and project managing the making of the film, including scheduling, budgeting, and securing locations.

The Middle Man: Director of Cinematography.Many productions will have a second director responsible for cinematography. The Director of Cinematography is responsible for cameras and lighting and may be necessary for complex shots using more than one camera or shots requiring elaborate camera work or lighting. In many cases, the Director may double as Director of Cinematography and even Cameraman. The important thing is that you have someone on set who understands how light, lenses, and camera sensors (or film if you’re lucky enough) work together.

The Incredibly Sound Guy: Audio Engineer.One of the most under-appreciated crew members on a film set is the Audio Engineer. Watching poorly shot footage is bearable, but listening to poorly recorded audio is just irritating. Most low budget movies use a mixture of shotgun microphones and lavalier (clip on) microphones for recording dialogue. Having someone who’s used to working with audio in post production will greatly enhance the overall quality of your movie.

The Divas: All the cast.Once you have your video and audio recording team together, you can start looking for actors. Make sure that anyone who gets in front of a camera can act, can take direction, and can take criticism, because a good director will have a particular idea of a shot in his head and it’ll probably take a few takes to get it. Having someone on the set who can’t handle feedback will ruin the experience for everyone and it’ll show on screen when the movie is finished.

The Style: The Art Department.The final part of your on-set crew is the “art department”. The art department are responsible for makeup, costumes and set design. Some low budget movies don’t even bother, but depending on your requirements, you may need someone on hand who’s good with a makeup kit and a sewing needle.

The Substance: The Editor.Once your movie is shot, you’ll need to have it edited. The editor’s job is to make your movie flow by creatively arranging all of the elements you shot on set, plus other elements such as music and narration.

When starting out, several of these roles will probably be filled by the same person, but you should always be on the lookout for people to add to your crew. Take all that you can take to make the best movie possible, but be sure to bring the right people on to the next, more interesting, more lucrative project.

Working with the same people regularly helps to build a team. Everyone knows everyone else’s abilities and limits and it all shows in the final movie. The best way to make one great film is to practice by making lots of terrible films first.

P#3. Practice

camera You might be wondering why I haven’t mentioned equipment in this post. In my experience, the crew members you choose will determine what equipment you end up using. Let the sound guy decide what microphones to use and let the cinematographer decide what camera to use. It’s more important that you get your crew together with whatever equipment you have and just start shooting. Write a seven minute short every week, and film it the following week. Within a month you’ll have made four short movies and let everyone practice their roles without much fear of failure. Above all, practice what you’re doing and one day you’ll find yourself making a movie that you feel proud of, and maybe one that propels you, and hopefully most of your crew, into careers that you’ll enjoy.

PLOT

The plot is the reason you’re making a film in the first place. If you get everything else right, but the plot underwhelms, your movie won’t achieve its objective. Every clip of video that was ever recorded onto any medium was made to tell a story. Sometimes the story was written in advance like in a movie, but often, stories unfold, and opportunistic film makers capture them through the lens. There should be something about this story that motivates you to retell it. Otherwise, how can you expect your audience to be motivated enough to sit through it?

What these methods of story telling share is a need for structure. Stories need a beginning, a middle, and an end. Writers tend to conform to the same plot structure regardless of genre. On average, one page of screenplay will translate into one minute of screen time, so a 120 page screenplay (the Hollywood standard) is likely to produce a movie that’s two hours long. The first half hour (pages 1-30) is usually devoted to the setup. It establishes the relationship between the main characters and exposes traits that may be important for understanding a character’s actions later in the film. Given that most audiences decide (consciously or not) whether they like a movie or not in the first ten minutes, and given that the first ten minutes is usually where the main characters are introduced, it’s crucial that the audience is made to care about them as early on as possible. Think of any movie you enjoyed and ask yourself whether you cared about the main characters early on in the film. You don’t have to have liked them, you just had to be interested in seeing what happens to them as the story unfolds. The next hour (pages 30-90) is the essential confrontation of the movie. It describes a conflict between the main characters and their environment. It’s this conflict that drives the dramatic actions of the movie. Without it, you have no story. The drama in your movie will be built on creating characters that people care about and testing them through confrontation and conflicting motivations. Finally, the dramatic tensions are resolved – usually somewhere between pages 90 and 120. The resolution offers a satisfying solution to the drama. It’s not simply the ending, which will be a final scene that closes off the movie, it’s everything that satisfies the intelligence and compassion of the audience – having already bared witness to the confrontation. One of the biggest challenges in screenplay writing is the transition between the parts. Most writers use plot points to achieve this. A plot point is any point in the story that dramatically alters the course of events. Plot points overlap between the various sections of the screenplay. The first plot point occurs between pages 25 and 30, taking us out of the slow paced setup and into the confrontation – the main unit of dramatic action. The second plot point occurs between pages 85 and 90, where perhaps we see the first signs that our hero can overcome his nemesis. These plot points compress certain transitional parts of the story to move us on to the next piece of important drama. This approach may seem overly formulaic but you’ll find that the best movies were written this way. It’s just a good method of telling a story. In the same way that most good painters put the sky at the top of the painting and the ground at the bottom, most good story tellers build their characters, put them in harms way, and then have them prevail in a way that is dramatic and unexpected.

Back in the day of the typewriter, it was important that screenplay writers learned how to format their works properly. Today we have a range of software that will do this automatically. Celtx (http://celtx.com/download.html) is a free application available for Windows, Mac, and Linux that intuitively formats your work into a proper screenplay and helps you to keep track of characters, crew actions, scheduling and a range of other production activities. It can be difficult to keep your train of thought while having to format your document properly, even within Celtx. Paul Murphy’s guide to “Letting it Flow” (http://brightsky.ie/letting-it-flow/) can help anyone writing in any medium to get their ideas written down without becoming overly distracted with formatting or technical elements.

PEOPLE

Chances are, like us, you don’t own a production company with lots of staff and a massive budget. If you want to make a movie of your own, you’ll need to fill a few key roles with good people that you can trust. We’ll assume you have a screenplay written, and you want to make a movie out of it. The first two people you’ll need are the Director and Producer. The Director’s job is to interpret the screenplay into a vision that keeps the actors and crew working towards getting the right shots. The Producer is responsible for getting funding, and project managing the making of the film, including scheduling, budgeting, and securing locations.

Many productions will have a second director responsible for cinematography. The Director of Cinematography is responsible for cameras and lighting and may be necessary for complex shots using more than one camera or shots requiring elaborate camera work or lighting. In many cases, the Director may double as Director of Cinematography and even Cameraman. The important thing is that you have someone on set who understands how light, lenses, and camera sensors (or film if you’re lucky enough) work together.

One of the most under-appreciated crew members on a film set is the audio recordist. Watching poorly shot footage is bearable, but listening to poorly recorded audio is just irritating. Most low budget movies use a mixture of shotgun microphones and lavalier (clip on) microphones for recording dialogue. Having someone who’s used to working with audio in post production will greatly enhance the overall quality of your movie. Anyone who’s used to working with audio on a computer should be able to handle all of your audio needs. If you can get someone who’s used to recording musicians, you have the added benefit of being able to use their contacts to get free original music for your soundtrack.

Once you have your video and audio recording team together, you can start looking for actors. Once you mention that you’re making a movie, you’ll probably find that most of your friends want to be in it. Just make sure that anyone who gets in front of a camera can act, can take direction, and can take criticism well because a good director will have a particular idea of a shot in his head and it’ll probably take a few takes to get it. Having someone on the set who can’t handle feedback will ruin the experience for everyone and it’ll show on screen when the movie is finished.

The final part of your on-set crew is the “art department”. The art department are responsible for makeup, costumes and set design. Some low budget movies don’t even bother, but depending on your requirements, you may need someone on hand who’s good with a makeup kit and a sewing needle.

Once your movie is shot, you’ll need to have it edited. The editor’s job is to make your movie flow by creatively arranging all of the elements you shot on set, plus other elements such as music and narration.

When starting out, several of these roles will probably be filled by the same person, but you should always be on the lookout for people to add to your crew. Film making is extremely enjoyable and satisfying and it’s something that a lot of people will put a lot of energy into for little or no pay. This doesn’t mean you should exploit them, it just means that it’s okay to ask for favours when you don’t have a budget, so long as you’re loyal to those people if you start making money from your productions. Take all that you can take to make the best movie possible, but be sure to bring those people on to the next, more interesting, more lucrative project.

PRACTICE

You might be wondering why I haven’t mentioned equipment in this post. In my experience, the crew members you choose will determine what equipment you end up using. Let the sound guy decide what microphones to use and let the cinematographer decide what camera to use. It’s more important that you get your crew together with whatever equipment you have and just start shooting. Write a seven minute short every week, and film it the following week. Within a month you’ll have made four short movies and let everyone practice their roles without much pressure of failure. When you’re ready go for a longer movie, but above all, practice what you’re doing and one day you’ll find yourself making a movie that you feel proud of, and maybe one that propels you, and hopefully most of your crew, into careers that you’ll enjoy.

Tags: Tuesday Tutorial/Video Production/Writing
Posted in Blog by Andy Doyle |