2. Professional Development in the Film Industry

 

2.1 : Roles in the Film Industry

Producer

A producer is without a doubt the most important role to play when making any type of movie or television show. Producers are in charge of getting permission from a production company to begin working on a project and overseeing the completion of that project by the due date within the constraints given. There are often multiple producers and multiple types of producers involved in a production, each of whom usually manage different parts of the production such as pre-production, post production or marketing.

Actor

Actors are the most important part of the production phase, being often what can make or break an entire film, regardless of the quality of the pre-production and the film crew working with them. It is an actors job to take on the role of a character (or sometimes multiple depending on the project) from the script of a film and turn them from a well written character into something greater than could initially have been thought of when it was just a script. Actors are the most well payed and famous of all roles in the film industry because they become the face of whatever projects they work on and gradually become household names across the world, as opposed to the likes of a producer or editor who would work on the sidelines of the project and out of the spotlight.

Director

The director is the most important person on set, being the person who has to direct the actors, camera operators, and many other numerous roles to achieve their creative vision of the script. Much like a producer, the director can be involved in as many or as few aspects of the project, occasionally being more involved in the pre or post-production side of things than they would normally. However, they will primarily just be part of the main production phase being almost completely in charge of everything to do with getting filming completed in time for the deadline.

Cinematographer

The cinematographer is the most artsy job of the production phase, being the one in charge of telling people how to capture and light every shot of the film in order to achieve the optimal look for what the director’s creative vision is. They have to make sure every shot has the correct look and feel to it that either keeps it matched up with or differentiates from other scenes in the film, depending on what the director is going for. They do this by telling the camera operators what type of shot they want and telling the lighting directors what kind of lighting is needed for that shot.

Camera Operator

The camera operator is like the ghost writer of the cinematographer, being the one who gets every shot they have been instructed to film by any means necessary. In order for the camera operator to be an optimal worker, they must look through the camera as if it were their own eyes and let the camera become one with them, being merely an extension of themselves. On top of filming everything with the camera, they also have to care for the camera; changing lenses, swapping out batteries and video storage, and in general keeping it in working condition so it is ready for every shoot.

Editor

The editor is the most crucial part of the post-production phase, excluding the visual effects team if it’s a big special effects movie like Transformers or a Marvel movie. The reason the editor is so important is because they decide what the final cut of the movie looks like, being what is sent out to cinemas to be screened to the world. Editors are in charge of pacing the movie, something which can deeply affect the feel of the film for both critics and the general audience. Editors will occasionally work with the director so his vision is kept intact when being finalised. The director and editor can sometimes become so intrinsically linked that the director will usually demand to have his own editors be brought along with him to every new project, an example of this being J.J. Abrams and his two favourite editors Maryann Brandon and Mary Jo Markey, who have worked alongside him on five of his major motion pictures.

2.2 : Production Relationships

2.3 : Routes of Progression Into the Film Industry

Throughout this course, I have delved much deeper into the various ways of broaching my entrance paths into the film industry than when I was just taking part in my usual school and tech courses. Not only has the course implored me to look into as many diverse and unorthodox methods of encroaching in on my ideal job in the film industry, but I have also learned different gateways into the industry through the numerous masterclasses we partook through the duration of this course.

Each lecturer had their own incredibly unique and intriguing tale of how they arrived at their current position this day. Each story had a winding roller coaster of success and failures – each of which varied in both tone and severity. Some were losses that didn’t have much of a fall out, and some were successes that felt quite underwhelming. The obvious entrance into the film industry is to undertake a film course at a university and then apply for the job you want at a company looking for employees.

Much to my surprise; very few of of these stories involved film school.

One story involved taking an internship at a movie production company and moving up from copying paperwork to rewriting scripts, then creating entirely new scripts and eventually to directing movies for that company. Then they left that company, started producing independent films, then after about 3 or 4 independently produced films, they took a production job at a new company and have been working there ever since.

Another story involved working a full time job in order to pay for equipment needed to film and produce short films, getting those short films screened at local film festivals, and then being hired by a larger company to work on one of its smaller budget projects, only to then work on its largest budget projects available for many years after that.

One of the ways that I didn’t hear much about in the masterclasses – but certainly have proof of it working – was portfolio based hiring. Making enough projects independently to put on a website for the world to see, gathering statistics information from the people who watch them, then applying for jobs by attaching the work you have produced and usually some kind of spreadsheet showing the statistics of and reception to your pieces of work.

After I finish this course, and then eventually my full time course at Workforce Training Services, I am looking to join the “Pearson BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Creative Media Production for TV and Film” course at Belfast Metropolitan College (Millfield Campus). Then if I graduate that course, I want to take part in a Film Studies course at university, be that at either Queen’s University or Ulster University in Magee. If necessary, I will take part in the Level 5 variation of this course before applying for university, assuming that my current grades may not be substantial enough to gain entrance into university just yet.

Links:

Belfast Metropolitan College – Millfield Campus: Pearson BTEC Level 3 Extended Diploma in Creative Media Production (TV and Film)

Ulster University – Magee Campus: Cinematic Arts – BSc (Hons)

Queen’s University: BA Film Studies and Production

The main reason why I chose this course, as opposed to some of the more visual effects focused courses available, is that I have a firm belief that a good editor should know more about a film than simply what goes in the right place and what flows well. An editor should know what makes a film tick: What was the writer contemplating whenever they wrote this line? How did the director picture this scene working out in his head? Did the camera operator mean to go out of focus during this scene?

Questions like those – and more importantly knowing the answer to them – are things that I feel are crucial to me even getting my littlest toe in the door. Why should anyone hire me if I can’t appreciate their work on a deeper meaning than “yeah, this looks pretty cool”?

Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but I simply cannot accept anything but complete and total knowledge of the in’s and out’s of everything to do with the production of film and television before I can even begin to comprehend doing editing professionally.

2.4 : Film Industry and Beyond

The media sector doesn’t just halt at film and television. As it were, this is but the tip of the iceberg, and below it can stretch the the very limits of your imagination with how it can encompass: Music, web shows, advertisements – you name it. Below I shall list five examples of the wider media sector, and within those five examples, I shall give you a single example of an outlier for the medium in which relates to the film and television industry.

Advertisements

The Tale of Thomas Burberry

Advertisements are usually either glorified music videos or a minute long experience watching a company flaunt its wealth by hiring the winner of that year’s best actor or actress ceremony or renting out the most expensive car they could find and driving it across the Spanish countryside, then just splashing the company’s logo over the top of it and hope people realise that advert had barely anything to do with the product.
However, recently there has been a surge of more intricate advertisements that don’t attempt to cater to your average television or internet audience, but instead take the high road and attempt to be a little more classy than its kin. Take “The Tale of Thomas Burberry” for example. A short film in the form of a trailer for a period piece biopic about the founder of the clothing company “Burberry”, detailing the history of the company’s creating in a brief 3 minute runtime while still getting a chance to show off the stylish clothes made by the company. Complete with a star-studded cast and exemplary cinematography, this advert is worth resisting the skip button.

Video Games

Her Story

Video games take many forms, but a majority of them follow a formula. While the lines drawn by this formula have faded over time, the main concept it’s trying to convey is that a game must be – well, a game. Although, you know what they say: Rules were made to be broken. Take “Her Story”, for example.
A game driven entirely by one actress and a single camera – neither of which move from their positions throughout the entire game. The gameplay style of “Her Story” is also extremely minimalist, focused around key words stated by the actress throughout the game to solve a mystery. Truly a tour de force in the indie game industry, winning several awards for its bold new style.
Something even more remarkable about it is that these style of games haven’t been seen since the mid ’90s, being seen as far too corny and niche compared to the more popular and versatile 3D animated cutscenes that were coming into popularity and becoming more affordable. They reincarnated a dead medium and turned it into something fresh, proving a game can be anything it wants to be – including a movie.

Web Shows

Epic Meal Time

When computers became more affordable, along with various pieces of equipment and software, people began to see an opportunity for self-producing and self-publishing work on the internet to get their start. While it may seem now like everyday there is a new trend on the rise, in the early days of YouTube, it was like a gold rush. As soon as people seen viral videos being so lucrative, everybody wanted a piece. This caused a dilution of the market, allowing for the rise of less random and more serialised content to emerge. While most of these were vloggers, a few people seen the opportunity to throw all of their cray crackpot ideas against on the wall and see what stuck. One of these ideas was “Epic Meal Time”

All of the intensity of “Hell’s Kitchen”, all of the ingredients of “Jamie Oliver”, and all of the visceral pungent food-gore of “Man vs Food”. Epic Meal Time was the fast food obsessive’s idea of heaven, creating meals using fast food restaurant orders as ingredients – complete with a fat and calorie counter to show just how much filthy, flabby, fatty foods they could pile on top of each other and then make an attempt to consume it. This show was one of the earliest examples of viral networking done right, and the success of it even led to getting its own TV show named “Epic Meal Nation”. YouTube’s success with its numerous ludicrous ideas have EMT to thank for bringing it to the forefront of the internet.

Books

Game of Thrones

Books have been intrinsically linked to some of the most popular film and television series throughout history: The Godfather, Shawshank Redemption, Game of Thrones. All of these immensely popular properties began with words on a page – and I don’t mean screenplays. While movies can do a fantastic job on their own to tell a story, books were the media type invented to tell stories. The only thing that movies have against books is that they are able to produce a form of storytelling that books will likely never broach – that being the story told through visuals rather than descriptions. Your brain will always find more ways to pick apart details better when it can cooperate with your eyes, rather than simply having to rely entirely on the brain to do all the work.

So imagine the flawless combination when you combine the narrative mastery of books with the exclusive-to-film visual storytelling to form a harmonious concoction. The best of both worlds. The coup de grâce of industrial consolidation. This has even went so far as to have the show taking precedence over books, as seen in shows such as Game of Thrones where the rate at which the show is produce exceeds that of the books being penned, and thus the writer must confide in the screenwriter to adapt his not yet completely fleshed out ideas to fill out the show while still keeping up the same narrative beats and quality as they would come to expect from the story.

Music

Shelter – Peter Robinson & Madeon

The music and film industries have always had a bond stronger than any of the other media sectors comparably. Even before movies had sound (paradoxically titled “silent films”), they always hired a piano player to sit beside the screen at the theatre and play the music to go along with the film. All of this to avoid having complete silence for longer than an hour. Later on, in the era of television, music was frightened of becoming faded out by the replacement of television over radio, so they needed a way to play music on television. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people didn’t want to look at a black screen when they paid so much money for something with a display on it.
Then they had an idea: “What if we shot footage to go along with the music, so then people would have something to watch while the music was playing and it would catch their attention while flicking through channels?”
And thus, MTV was born.

While it started as simply recordings of the bands live on tour, they soon developed more fantastical and outlandish ideas. While some videos chose a more… abstract approach, a lot of other videos chose a more direct form of storytelling – akin to that of short films. One of the most popular and beautiful examples of this is “Shelter”, by American musicians Porter Robinson and Madeon, who teamed up with Japanese animation studio “A-1 Pictures” to produce the music video. The video lasts for six minutes, while the song only lasts for about three, prioritising the narrative over their own music. The video is about a girl who lives in a virtual reality space of her own design, but despite having the entire world at her fingers, she still finds herself losing interest in her play space, not knowing what else to do. The video follows her as she searches for any sign of life outside of her box, and we feel every emotional (and musical) beat on the road.