War Story by Alana

1. In your job, what are some challenges you have to deal with in relating to “production” people (they will likely know exactly what you mean, production refers to producers, location people, coordinators, assistant directors and pa’s). Another way of asking this is to question how a production person can best help facilitate this person’s job.
In the world of TV it’s always meeting schedules. The producers try to condense the shooting time as much as possible to try and save money but it doesn’t allow people that need to get things ready very much time. The big thing is always timing and scheduling. If you’re shooting on location and they want to shoot at location five days then it’s up to production designer and art director what needs to happen at that location before it needs to be shot. Might need to create big design or cover a garage they don’t want to see and figure out what you’re going to build in front of garage; you need to get a lot of people in there to get it together, so its hard for scheduling. The most important thing in any of the relationships between producer and you is communication. Be clear about what you want, knowing what you want and knowing you only have x amount of money to do what you want and be flexible to do what you want. Very important that everyone communicates, between producer, director, art director and then my crew (art crew).

2. Can you tell me a war story, or a story of when something went badly wrong, or seemed like it was going to fall apart, but then ended up working out [or didn’t work out]. If the story relates to producing or locations, that is terrific.
I’ve never been in something that actually was about to fall apart. The machine that is the film industry has a lot of checks and balances. Most of the screw ups I’ve had are working in features. They have bigger budgets and then you have a director or producer that suddenly decides they have something or need something last minute. Because they have the money to do it then as the art director you have to be able to get it done in a short amount of time. One director walked on to a set and decided he didn’t like the paint color of the set so they had to call painters in that area and get it done all that night. You have to have the money to do that though. On TV series you see the sets before they are shot and they don’t have as big a budget. Sometimes stunts or special effects can go wrong on features. We had rented a very nice hotel room in Toronto and the windows were supposed to blow out and they hired a special effects person to create the explosives. To do this we only get one shot at it, and everything was in place and when the explosion went off and it blew up every window of the stores across the street. The special effects person put to much explosives in the room so they had to pay for all the damages.

3. Do you have any advice for a person starting out in the business, someone who is about to graduate?
The best thing to do is start apprenticing for a production and learning what all the different departments do and see which one you’d like to work in. Once you know which one you want to work in, lighting, camera design department and so on and you have a feeling for what those jobs entail then you get the training you need. Go to design lighting school and so on. It’s important to know where your passion lies and then you get the training you need for it.