I’m not a real film director but life is strange and I have written, produced and directed a very short film – we’re still editing it, I’ll keep you informed about its next step. :)
There is a lot of good advice on the Internet: let me add here a few naive hints. :)
- I had just one day to shoot so I previously wrote a detailed script and created many tables that group takes (with their length and the like) in scenes, scenes in sets etc.: it won’t be enough but it helps. Of course, during the day, I changed things – and their order – a few times but a film is a project, right? Your film crew is like a team (twelve people in my case) and I’m an engineer in real life so being a producer/director is not that far from being a project manager. :) I supposed that eleven hours would have been enough: I was wrong. It took fifteen hours, and you can’t stop the sun, of course. :) But we completed what I had planned: imagine what would have happened without a good schedule.
- Even a simple make-up requires more than half an hour for an actress and a few minutes less for an actor: that’s a lot of time that you have to count in your time table. The setting up of the camera and the sound take time too but these are easy to understand.
- Special effects: that’s post production, of course, but try to keep the number of VFXs as low as possible.
- Find a good cinematographer: he helped me more than what I’d have expected from a DOP… being smart, fast and creative is essential. :) Your two arms are, first, the DOP and, later, the Editor. :)
- The story is the core but a good camera, lights, location and many other things can make the difference: they are not cheap but if you want to try to be admitted to some festival around the world, even if you are not a real producer, I’m sorry but you have to spend a bit of money. :)
Then, don’t forget a few rules taken from a previous post. :)
