1. Know your resources
Production can be war. It’s a war raged against reality. Why? Because reality will try every way it can to stop you from creating your fictional reality, and that’s the creative at the core of the production. There is a sense sometimes on a set that Murphy’s Law is having its way with us. Everything that can go wrong is going wrong. This is because what we’re trying to do swim upstream from everything else.
Think about it: You want to stop traffic so you can create fake traffic. Everyone in the world is just trying to get to work. You’re telling them to hit pause on real life so you can make a fake version. Even if you limit your entire production to one “location” and it’s your living room, what happens when a plane flies overhead and ruins sound?
It’s not a “woe is me and my production” sort of thing. It’s actually the natural order of things. You are disrupting it with your production. Taking this attitude will help you anticipate problems. It will help you get goodwill from the world around you. It will help you achieve your goal.
You have TWO resources at your disposal in the battle against reality: time and money. You’ve heard the cliche that time is money, and that’s true. You need both and you’ll need more of both than you have. The key for you is to know precisely how much you have of each and to maximise each second and each penny spent. They are precious. They are the only way this thing happens. Know the budget. Know it by heart, inside and out. That’s the best advice you could get. A production lives and dies by its budget. It’s the key to the kingdom. Which takes us to our next step.
2. Knowing the Budget
A lot of different tasks can ultimately fall to you, but the budget is the big one. Often at least one film producer’s job is to make a budget. If the budget exists in some early form when you come on, then the job will be to remake it and adjust it. Constantly. Budgeting is a major responsibility. Say you just finished writing your short film and you plan to direct it. You have to raise some money first.
But you’ll need to make some kind of budget to even know how much to ask for. At the same time, if you hire someone to make that preliminary budget for you, you’ll want to check their work. Did they just add numbers for departments without doing any research? How did they arrive at certain numbers? Did they break down shooting days first or the number of people on set?
This is why knowing some of the basics about budgeting are so critical to anyone creating video content. Start practicing by making budgets for free with sonnyboo’s free budget template. Get a sense of what real budgets look like of all scales and scopes. Ask producer friends. Know budgets inside and out.
3. Scheduling
This is often the domain of a 1st Assistant Director and their department, but often a line producer is involved as well. Scheduling is where your time and money resources collide into either a beautiful harmony of a nightmarish hellscape. Usually both. You’ll have to put your department leaders heads together to make this work. How long do we have the actors for and which days co-mingle with location availability, the price of gear rentals, and…a whole lot of other things.
Don’t try and go it alone here. Take all the factors into account and then make a hierarchy. If Tom Hanks is the lead in the movie, his schedule might be the most important thing. Maybe not…you’d have to ask someone who’s produced a Tom Hanks movie. I’m not that person. But you get the idea.
Scheduling follows a script breakdown which allows you to parse out every element that will eventually make its way to the screen. Locations you need, how many days you need them, same for talent, etc. The schedule and the budget are the maps that lay out the usage of your two most important resources: money and time.
4. Revise the budget
The budget is REALLY important. It’s really in every single step. You made a preliminary budget, but once you have a schedule in place, you have ideas about other needs. Maybe you found ways to save (Ha!) but you probably found more ways to spend (sorry!).
So now what? Revise that budget. Now is when you want to really get close to your budget, to where you can do some math in your head about it on set when trouble arises. Knowing the budget backward and forwards makes you a production wizard. You can quickly assess what choices you have and what type of domino effect a choice will lead to.
The director might really want something you can’t afford, so what changes can you make to get it and what does that affect…You have to be able to lay it all out clearly. If you don’t, you’ll end up granting the director his or her wish, but then having lost them something else they didn’t realize they’d lose. Most important of all is not that you’d be blamed, but that the project would suffer. Which is just to say that things are going to change faster and faster once things get humming along, so revise now and be ready to revise again in the heat of the moment.
Sometimes you can practice revising the budget in advance by thinking, “Hmmm, if disaster strikes on a day and it pours and we can’t shoot any of this stuff, and we need to add a full day to the end of the shoot…do I have enough money in contingency for that?” These are called war games. Prepare for every outcome. You’ll still be surprised by what hits you. That’s the fun of it, right?
5. Locations, locations, locations
Locations SHOULD get their own department. But that doesn’t mean they will. If they don’t, your producer responsibilities may extend out to locations. As a quick aside, that’s true about a lot of things. They often have their own department. If they don’t, a producer will have to figure it out.
People often wonder what does a producer do? Sometimes nothing. Sometimes everything. It can be very expensive to permit a location, but it’s a wise move. Even if you think your shoot has a small footprint, it only takes one angry person with some extra time on their hands to shut things down. You don’t want to be fast-talking your way out of those situations with police or security in order to make sure everything gets in the can. Trust me, I’ve had to do it.
When you get locations, be sure to consider parking. Consider where you’ll stage gear. Consider if you have a van and how it will get there. Where will holding be? What about the trailers? Arriving somewhere with nowhere to park it is not ideal. Plan in advance and go legit. Pull permits, get insurance, engage with a lawyer. All of these things should be no-brainers, but sadly they are not. It doesn’t just lead to productions being halted, it can lead to legal trouble you don’t want.
We romanticise the idea of the run and gun, and people get away with it. But if you think your shoot might get in the way of normal life, you want to dot your Is and cross your Ts. Protect yourself and your creative vision.
6. Getting ready to roll
Make your call sheets! Or make sure the AD department is making them. Here is a super simple, clean, and FREE industry standard call sheet template you can use for all of your productions. Be sure to keep the data on your call sheets and contact lists private and for the crew only. Check and double check who they go out to.
7. Shooting and trouble shooting
Once production is off, you have to focus on two things: what is going wrong currently and what might go wrong tomorrow. This means that if there isn’t a fire to put out in the moment, you’re planning against potential fires tomorrow. Most of the time, the present isn’t of concern to a producer on set. It’s tomorrow you have to worry about.
The call sheet is a biggie. A 2nd AD or 2nd 2nd AD will spend much of the day prepping the call sheet for tomorrow. Some producers may have a big role in this as well. There may also be factors to adjust for. Can you save a little money by returning something you ‘wrapped on’ and picking up something that’s only being used for the next shoot day? Can you coordinate with rental houses and PAs/Runners to make that happen?
Another task on a small project is to collect every receipt from everyone and track every expense in real time. If you have production coordinators, they will likely do this as well, but the smaller the “show,” the more a producer will have to do themselves. And trust me, it doesn’t hurt to cut your teeth on those types of projects. You might be the producer of a short, and you might be tasked with all of this and more. It’ll be good for you in the long run. Well… it’ll probably shave a few years of your lifespan, but it’ll be good for your career in the long run.
The best part of the shoot for the producers is that sometimes, for a second or two at a time, things seem to be going smoothly and according to plan, so you can just sit back and enjoy it. But like I said, that’s usually only for a second or two.