Monday, January 30th: Production team and equipment

Today we took a look at the production environment.  This includes knowing what all of the main departments and jobs during the production phase include.  Below is a sample chart that shows many of the main jobs and also demonstrates who the department head is.  Each person is responsible for answering to their department head, who in turn answers to the assistant director and the director.  The director is the boss of the set - and what's missing from this chart is the fact that the director answers to the producers.

For a complete listing of film crew positions and descriptions of what each job does, check out this wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_crew

In starting this conversation, we also had a look at some statistics about the number of women working in Hollywood ().  As it turns out, women make up more of the people going to see and pay admission to movies, but the number of women working on the movies is dismally poor.  Think about this next time you slap down $10 to see another Hollywood movie that you probably won't even enjoy!

We also took a look at some of the common production equipment, including:
The Camera - obviously super important, this is what controls, records, and stores your image:

Camera support - in order to control the motion of your camera you may need some kind of support.  The simplist way to support and stabilize your camera is with a tripod:

Large scale productions also have other things to control the motion.  For super smooth sideways or in and out motion you can put the camera onto a platform with wheels that run on a track.  This is called a Dolly:

And here's a look at the production crew working to pull off a dolly shot for 'Last Days':

Often, they also put the camera on a crane for high to low shots and swinging sideways shots with a great up and down motion.  This is also called a Jib:

At about 30 seconds in is a famous crane shot from 'Touch of Evil':

For shots where you need smooth motion but need to walk or run in environments where you can't use a dolly, they put the camera onto a shock absorbing vest and spring-loaded arm system called a steadycam - it looks pretty crazy but it is very effective:

 And here is some early and amazing steadycam work from 'The Shining'

The other major element to a movie is sound - so we looked at the main devices for capturing good sound on location.  They use a special kind of microphone, usually what's called a shotgun microphone, attached to a long pole called a boom pole.  All together this set up is often referred to as the boom microphone.  The long pole allows the microphone to be placed overhead or below the action, just out of the way of the camera's shot.  Here's what the boom microphone set up looks like - the microphone is usually encased in a wind-muffler:

We discussed the other departments - the main ones included the lighting and electrical departments, locations, casting, hair and makeup, and set design.  We'll look more in depth at all of this soon.

After we learned each of these roles and the equipment used, we broke into small production teams and did a very mini mock shoot where everybody was assigned a production job and had about a half an hour to plan out a simple scene from a script.