The director is obviously one of the most crucial elements of any film. If you're serving as director, it won't take you long to recognize just how much work is involved, especially if you're on a small budget and have to accomplish all the tasks that would normally be assigned to a host of assistants. A big budget, however, affords you the luxury of hiring any number of assistant directors and unit directors who will not only save you time but relieve you of a significant amount of stress.

Directing Specialties

Assistant directors, or ADs, are individuals whose specialty it is to keep the balance between actual filming and the daily production schedule. Contrary to their title, they aren't actually the director's assistant in the traditional sense. They don't pour coffee or fetch dry cleaning. They do, however, track a film's progress, prepare call sheets, and make sure that everything is on time and within range of the schedule. They also coordinate with actors and crew to maintain shooting schedules.

As with producers, the title of director also has varying levels of assistants. The first assistant director is indispensable, especially if you have a long, difficult shoot that requires the use of many different locations or complex scenes that need extra setup time. A good first assistant director can make everything run so smoothly that no one else needs to worry about anything. A second assistant director is often hired to help in the preparation of call sheets and also monitor the movements of cast members. The third assistant director is issued a variety of tasks, one of which is keeping track of and monitoring the film's extra cast members, commonly known as extras or background actors.

Second Units

Big-budget productions and television series often have second unit teams. Unlike the main filming unit, or first unit, these are small teams of individuals, led by a unit director, and typically include camera operators and a skeleton crew. The job of the second unit director and his team is to shoot a film's minor or secondary scenes that contain special effects, action sequences, or establishing shots that don't require the use of actors. Say, for example, your two lead characters are walking through the desert. You want to give the audience a sense of the desert by showing a bird's eye view of two people trudging through the sand. Because there are no actual closeups of the actors' faces in that particular establishing shot, anyone could take their place. As a producer, you would assign that sequence to your second unit.

Second units also film what are called inserts, which are either shot simultaneously during a production schedule or during postproduction in the editing phase. Inserts are typically shots showing some type of detail, like a hand turning a doorknob or a candle being lit by someone who is presumed to be the actor, but could in fact be anyone.