Pre-Production Assignment 1

How You Plan Your Short filming

Step 1

So to begin with you need to decide whether your filming a movie, a TV show, or just a standard video, as this is very important as it effects the type of things you will have to consider to make your recording. if you were to choose a movie or a TV show the main thing you'd need to consider is your budget making either of these is definitely not cheap so your need to make sure you have the money to create them and to keep the budget as low as possible as it is your first short. Another thing that the choice of production affects is the way that it is filmed a standard video would just be more likely a single camera with only a few people starring in it the budget would mainly be quite low and the camera wouldn't need a cinematic look and not much editing also a script would most likely not be used. with a short movie it will be expensive and you need to create a script for it and think about camera angles and so on.

Step 2

Something that you will certainly need to think about is time, with creating a short you will be making a lot of deadlines for your calendar on when you need to finish certain tasks such as filming a scene for a short movie. and generally you'll have to manage time so that the whole project is finished for a certain date. to help you to manage time you could plan all the occasions on a calendar or on excel or a program that allows you to write down the dates and then tick when they are completed.

Step 3

so if you are making this production you will need a lot of equipment, cast, crew, etc... so the best bet is to look online to hire out most of these things so that the cost isn't crazy if you bought all these things then it would cost way to much, you will have to be organised and make sure you have all of them listed down this is where you will have to use Microsoft excel to list down all the things you will need and list how much they will cost so then you know how much you will have to spend to create this project.

Step 4

So for budgeting you want to be spending as least money as you can because if this is your short film and your just starting out most likely it isn't going to be very good or as goods as ones you will make in the future a first movie is normally a draft movie which is mainly made for fun and to learn from the mistakes in it so you can make a better one later so spending loads of money with a big budget on your first movie wouldn't be a great idea. So to plan the budget so will need a budget form so you can calculate the total budget of your movie, because you want everything cheap and its your first movie if you need equipment such as cameras and tripods the best idea is to hire out equipment instead of buying it as this will make the movie much cheaper.

Step 5

When directing the cast you need to give them clear instructions on how the scene plays out and how the characters display there emotions in the scene its best off to gives simple description of what emotions they should be displaying on camera, the film should be shot so that you get good coverage of your shots so you can cover a lot of space in your shots, bad coverage can result in awkward filming and the shots in the movie just won't look right, with good cinematography you can use it to express emotions and show symbolism through camera work for example a low angle shot looking up at a person shows that that person is powerful and maybe menacing depending on the character, a high angle shot from above shows a person being less powerful and weak or there's something that is more powerful then them, there's loads of shots you can do to show subtle emotions and character explanations.

Step 6

So to make sure you have full consent from your cast and crew to be able to go under the permissions in film, to achieve this a form must be signed by all your cast and crew, if not the movie would not be able to be entered in any festivals or make any money, also movies must not have logos that do not belong to you in it this is a form of copyright as you will be using there logo to make money and they will not be making any especially big name brands. If you want your film to be applicable to festivals and to earn money you need to not break any copyright rules. Also if filming people from the public if any people under 16 are filmed they will have to have signed a form to say they are happy with them being filmed whilst unaware and this will have to be signed by a parent/guardian.