Looking back, looking forward

Now that we have (basically) wrapped on principal photography for Stopover City I feel a huge weight off my shoulders, and have started functioning like a normal human being again???! Obviously a lot has to be done in post production (our editor already has a rough cut), but I have confidence in my team that everything will be just dandy. Now I can do things again such as: sleep, eat meals, and look ahead to future projects. I had a ton of fun doing developing Stopover, and it has inspired me to start development on my senior thesis which I'd like to create next fall. It's honestly never too early to start pre-production, so why not start now! Pretty recently I decided not to take any production classes in the spring because this semester was so intense--I'll definitely work on other people's films here and there but I need a semester-long breather from production classes. 

Being less stressed has also allowed me to think ahead to future semesters logically--I turned down the offer to produce ICTV's late night show After Hours (which I currently Assistant Produce) because I realized that producing isn't my thing. The upside to turning it down is that I was given the offer to design a new set for the spring semester. Here's the current setup of the show:

It looks nice once cameras are framed up, but the walls are super heavy and those brown beams are literally falling apart and every Tuesday I fear that one of the PA's will get hurt. Fortunately Porn: the Musical is donating 5 of their thin white walls to us, which i can manipulate any way I'd like. I'd personally like to make the set a bit wider, and 86 the bland white walls altogether. It's definitely going to take some time & careful effort to plan, but I'm hella excited to do it.

It definitely won't be as extravagant as Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, but hey, I'll do my best with what I have. 

Producing for Dummies

I'd like to state for the record that producing is not actually for dummies. Nor is this an attack on you, Diana. If anything, the dummy in this situation is me. I found myself sitting in my room this afternoon, and the question popped into my head: "What exactly do movie producers do?" So, I did my research and actually found that it's a whole lot more than what I originally thought.

A producer's job begins in preproduction. Psh, I knew that. What I didn't know is that the producer is the person who pretty much gets the project off the ground. First, he (or she, of course) needs to find material for his next project from either a script or a book. Then he needs to get a script in good enough shape to attract the attention of a possible director (and even a studio if a studio wasn't the one who started the project). After that, the producer's job in preproduction is pretty much done. HAH! Yeah, right.

Once the producer has a workable script and a choice of director, all he needs to do is secure financing for the film, choose a director and other members of the creative team, work with the director to cast actors, determine shooting locations and budget, decide on a cinematographer, hire the rest of the production team (including other producers), develop a shooting schedule, and create a detailed plan of action for the entirety of production. PHEW! That's one demanding job! Oh wait, the producer isn't even close to being done.

Time to begin shooting! Now it comes to the actual production; the fun part! Or at least it's fun for some people. Sorry, producer, you're on the clock. Production is when the producer offers creative suggestions to the director, handles any and all problems with the actors and creative staff, monitors the production timetable and budget, and reviews the film shot each day. Essentially, the producer has to watch over everything. If something goes wrong, the producer better find a solution, and fast.

And now it finally reaches postproduction, the time for most people to relax and wait to see what they've worked so hard on for so many months. Postproduction is really only horrible for the editors, sound, and special effects guys, right? Wrong. Believe it or not, the producer's job still isn't done. To begin the final step, the producer sits down with the director over a nice cup of tea and decides the order and selection of scenes that will appear in the final cut of the film. After that, he reviews each cut of the film until it's satisfactory. NOW all the producer's got to do is secure a distributor for the film and review the distributor's advertising campaign. After this, and only after this, is the producer's job finally complete.

Never before today did I truly appreciate the work of producers. I honestly believed they were just the piggybanks of the production team. I know it's difficult to believe, but I was wrong. Oh so wrong. Here's to you, producers!

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

For Fall Break, I went to visit my friend who is studying abroad in Montreal and awkwardly tagged along with her class when they went to visit the CBC, the main broadcasting company in Canada, acting as the national radio and television broadcaster. It was formed in 1936 and is the longest running media corporation in Canada and hosts the most radio and news shows, airing in both English and French.

To start off the tour, we had to put on a fake newscast in a very realistic studio setting. They had students working in the control room and being both news anchors and reporters, the recording lasted about 20 minutes and had 5 segments. Unfortunately, I somehow got roped into being a reporter (because you can't just hang back when a frenchman calls you out) and ended up reading on camera as an automotive expert, and Shanghai reporter, Wong Lee. Complete with fake backgrounds, scripts and external video, it was a completely student run "broadcast" (Sorry for the bad quality of the pictures, they were taken from a phone).

After stumbling our way through that, we took a quick tour of the building, starting off with the main newsroom. They have approximately 200 people constantly monitoring news around the world and maintaining the CBC social media. In the same room they were filming a splitscreen for that evening between an anchor and a reporter on the other side of the room. We then went to go check out on of their main radio studios where they usually air live music and group interviews. While one of the guides played some dramatic background music on the piano, the other explained how the uneven stature of the walls prevented echos and created a very clean and quick sound. The very last stop on the tour was to their main television studio, which is the third largest studio in North America (about 6 times as large as Studio A here, minus the green curtain). They tend to film live studio shows here with an audience, but even then, they only take up about three fourths of the studio. They also mentioned that even with platforms or rugs down, the never show the floor in their studios, and thats how you tell if shows, especially soap operas, are filmed in a studio.

It was very similar to the BBC, which I toured when I studied in London, except the BBC put much more emphasis on their fiction shows, whereas the CBC is mainly news and radio. Also unlike the BBC, CBC employs commercial advertising in addition to it's federal funding, with the exception of radio. The building itself is a very prominent figure in the landscape, with a very futuristic feel to it on the inside.