Enhancing Your Production Team by Barb Karg, Rick Sutherland, & Jim Van Over
Now that you've learned about essential crew members, you can begin to understand the various other positions that can be filled when you have the luxury of a bigger budget. This can include management personnel such as a production or location manager, a wide range of production and directorial staff, artists and computer technicians, and all types of specialists. While in a low-budget film, an individual will have to juggle more than one discipline; a higher-budget production allows for crew members to focus on a particular job.
As you learned in the previous chapter, a producer is the individual in charge of overall production. This can be a daunting task for even the best-organized individual. With a healthy budget, you can hire additional production staff who can share the enormity of work that inevitably comes with making a film. This can include a unit production manager, production manager, coordinator, designer, dressers, and assistants who help the production assembly line hum like a well-oiled machine.
Production Manager
In lower-budget film productions, a producer wears many hats. Big-budget endeavors, however, are a different story. If your project has significant financing, you can hire a production manager to keep the wheels turning. This individual's primary concern is keeping the shooting schedule on track, overseeing all day-to-day operations, and controlling the film's budget. He also coordinates and oversees all preproduction operations, supervises shooting locales, and creates and maintains the overall and daily cash flow activities, including salaries and equipment. When hiring for this position, it's important to find an individual who can keep a level head at all times in addition to getting the job done.
In general, the production manager reports to the producer and must be extremely organized, an excellent facilitator, and — above all — a delegator. Often production managers hire the department heads. A production manager's support staff can include the location manager, catering crew, transportation captain, and production secretary, among others.
Designers and Decorators
How a motion picture ultimately comes across onscreen is the result of many different creative forces, not the least of which is the design team. Constantly in motion, with a healthy mix of flexibility and spontaneity, these individuals constitute a force to be reckoned with. The production designer is the creative guru of this team, the individual responsible for the overall look and feel of a film.
Working directly with the production designer's guidelines is the set designer, who creates the construction drawings and blueprints for each set. If you're filming an elaborate period piece or science fiction adventure, this job can be overwhelming. Once the sets are built, the set decorator is directly responsible for setting up and maintaining the appearance of sets. This individual ensures that furnishings, curtains, plants, and floor coverings are precisely in place for each scene. In regard to film continuity, these individuals are extremely important.
Additional Producers
On any given film, there are a number of producers listed in the credits. One of the most common is the executive producer, which, as far as producers go, has no specific definition. Typically, the executive producer has little involvement in the technical or creative aspects of a film. Instead, she's focused on the film's financial and business dealings. In some cases, she may help secure financing for the production or finance the film herself. It could also be that she lends credibility to a film's distribution, or represents a production company that has a stake in the production. On independent films, investors who contribute more than 25 percent of a film's budget are often awarded the title of executive producer.
What is a co-producer?
The title of co-producer can mean several different things. Often it's a title given to two or more producers who work as a group and basically split the jobs a producer normally handles alone. It can also be a title given to an actor as a perk or to go along with a raise in salary.
Another common position is associate producer, a job description that changes depending on the type of production and the individual's contribution to that production. Commonly, the associate producer performs certain tasks as delegated by the producer or production manager. If, for example, you're working with a production company that has some small involvement with your film, the individuals associated with that company can be given the title of associate producer.
The production coordinator, or PC, is a hard-working member of the production crew who often provides the glue that holds the production itself together. When hiring a PC, you should be on the lookout for a highly organized individual who can juggle, among other things, the responsibility of renting equipment, hiring crew members, and finding accommodations for crew and cast.
