Step 4: Production
Production is the most grueling part of filmmaking. The cast and crew can frequently spend 12 or more hours on the set, filming only three or four pages of script, often in very uncomfortable locations. This goes on for days, weeks, months with the same schedule day after day, review dailies (the footage shot yesterday), shoot today’s footage, prepare for tomorrow’s filming. For many people though, this is the most exhilarating part of production and this is indeed where "the magic happens." Yet to some people it sometimes seems strange that a movie that will eventually only occupy two hours onscreen could take months to film. However, it does, and here’s just a few of the reason why.

Lighting: One of the single most important elements to a film’s visual appearance is lighting. However perfect lighting does not exist and takes time to create. Lighting must be made consistent (or inconsistent depending) and mood-enhancing, yet remain unobtrusive. It takes a great deal of planning and then man-hours by electricians and their assistants to create a light set-up for even a small set.

To illustrate this I will take the story of fictional director Joe Schmotz, who is currently filming his next Oscar-winner, Killer Cows From The Martian Suburbs. Now the particular scene director Schmotz is filming today calls for a dark eerie setting as the main character first encounters the sinister Dark Cow who is trying to take over the world.

This particular scene starts with a long shot as we see the hero entering a dimly lit corridor. The next shot is a close-up of the main character’s face as he realizes the Dark Cow is blocking the corridor. The next shot is of the Dark Cow itself, smiling in typically sinister fashion. On the screen this takes all of fifteen seconds, yet this scene will take hours to film. First the main character’s movements must be choreographed for the first shot in a process called blocking. This is extremely important so that the character does not step out of the light and mess up the shot. Additionally the lighting must be placed so as to illuminate the main character’s initial entrance, but leave the surrounding area somewhat dark and gloomy. It takes a while for the to move lights into position and then practice the movements, since the actor has very little room in which to maneuver. Once every thing is set, the director does six takes to get two good pieces of footage.

The next shot is the close-up of the main character. But our lighting from before won’t work, because even though it was interesting to see shadows dappling off the face of out main character in the first shot, in the close up it will make him look like a zombie. So in this shot we need to change the lighting to light up his features more so we can see his eyes and mouth, while retaining the darkness around him. Thus the lights must be removed from their original positions and moved slightly to create our second light set-up. This time it takes closer to ten takes to get good footage because the director wants to experiment with the character looking scared, angry, and then both.

For our third shot we have to start from scratch. In the initial shot, the Dark Cow wasn’t even visible, since it would somewhat anticlimactic if the audience saw the Dark Cow before the character was surprised by it. So we have to create a whole new lighting scheme, this time lighting the Dark Cow in appropriately dim light while at the same time keeping enough illumination in the background to accentuate the griminess of his home as well as draw attention to his looming size. Though these are details that the audience will take up in the blink of an eye, it takes more time of careful preparation to properly execute. In addition to this, the director wants the Dark Cow to loom above the audience, so he wants a hole cut in the floor for the camera to sit in. This is not abnormal. Often shots in a movie will require special equipment such as dolly track, platforms, or holes, to be built while filming. And of course that’s not even counting the time it takes to make a cow stand on its hind legs and look menacing.

Location: Sometimes it is possible to film an entire movie on a sound stage, however, more than likely it requires some traveling. Since science has yet to create a teleportation device and all the magicians who know how to do it won’t reveal their secrets unless televised on broadcast television, it can take huge amounts of time to transport the cast and crew to even one location per day. To be quite frank there are probably close to 100 people involved in a major film, excluding crowd scene extras and so on, as well as literally tons of equipment to go along with them.

Weather: Mother Nature doesn’t really care about Hollywood and can quite frequently hamper production. Usually it is no more than a rain storm that stops production for a day or two, or a heat wave that causes shorter work days. But sometimes weather can be extremely costly. Such was the case of Kevin Costner’s Waterworld that saw entire sets destroyed and sunk by sea storms that not only seriously delayed the production, but also pushed the budget sky-high.

Previously I mentioned that lighting is one of the most important elements in a movie. In addition to lighting, and of course the actors, cinemotography is the key element in a film’s visual appearance. Though it takes years of either schooling or job experience to truly learn how to film well, there are a few basic pointers that anyone with a camera and eye towards making something better than a jerky home movie should know (because seriously, those "How to Film" videos they hand out now when you buy a camcorder are really just a twenty minutes session in which they try to sell you all the accessories).

Now very few of us who own basic film equipment are affluent enough to also be able to own a studio and lighting equipment to create the perfect lighting situations. To avoid bad lighting try to film in bright sunlight or extremely well lit rooms. If you film indoors you often end up with a yellow hue to the picture, this is because standard light bulbs emit a different wavelength of light than sunlight. Therefore, try to get lightbulbs that are sun-light balanced, meaning that the range of light it emits is the same as sunlight. Quite often this is not possible as these bulbs are fairly expensive. If this is the case, then it is possible to purchase gels to place over the camera. Depending on the size of your cameras lens, most newer models are only two or three inches across, you can purchase gel samplers from science equipment companies. Though these come in a somewhat inconvenient little cluster, for under ten dollars you can get up to 50 different kinds of filters that can change the color of incoming light or alter it for effects. With many of these filter samplers there are a number of gels that balance indoor light to sunlight, returning colors to their normal hues. Though this is somewhat of a cheezy way to get better light, its cheap and it works (most of the time).

The second part of good light is exposure. Exposure is, its simplest terms, brightness. Different amounts of light, and the amount desired for a particular mood affect your exposure, or brightness. Exposure is measured in f-stops, the higher the f-stop the less light is hitting the film. Another feature related to the lens is focus. Most camcorders come with automatic focus, however, for best results it should be disabled and you should focus manually otherwise it will frequently adjust itself and mess up your shot. To ensure that your whole scene is in focus when you use a zoom, zoom the camera in completely, focus it at that range, then zoom out. Focus does not change when you change to zoom distance, only when you change to physical distance between camera and object.


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