Production Moodboards

 

The Nine Stages of Pre-Production!

For the first part of our course, we'll be planning a scene for a zombie film that we're designing and a trailer. First of all, however, there is a lot of thought that needs to be put into the pre-production. There are nine very important stages of this: type of production, financial issues, time scales, personnel, facilities, materials, contributors, locations and codes of practice and regulations. As a student in sixth form, there are positives and negatives to these aspects of film-making.

• Type of production: Zombie film. Nowadays, teenagers and adults are attracted to zombie films, particularly ones with comedy and lots of believable gore. Shaun of the Dead and World War Z (respectively) are good examples of these. They're also easy to make cheaply as long as you have a good make-up artist. However, they can also be messy, include a lot of work to be done and could be seen as over-done. Another example of a type of production is a 'romcom', like Shaun of the Dead or Warm Bodies, which are 'zomromcom's.  Conventions are very important in telling us what kind of production it is as well. The term conventions basically equates to clues. If, for example, the production is simply a horror, the zombies or frightened expressions of characters would tell us what genre it was. In a comedy horror, such as Shaun of the Dead (the image below) depicts the character's unamused and slightly freaked-out expression as a comedy while being surrounded by zombies, fitting the intended horror theme.

• Finance: Low-budget. All the best films are made with exceedingly high budgets, often in the millions and billions. Unfortunately, as an unemployed student, I haven't the luxury to spend more than £100 on a single scene. Low-budgeting is usually in the thousands, such as £20,000. If I were to have £20,000 as my budget, I would have to be very vigilant on my prices and what I spend my money on. However, if I were to have £50,000, I could afford to spend more on personnel or materials as I'd have more money to use to make it more visually pleasing.  While low-budgeting can be good (more profit in the end), it must all be self-funded and other employees (see personnel) have to be paid. Finance would be used on hiring out locations and materials as well, hopefully the best that one could afford. Not only this,
• Time scales: Whenever the school is empty (or mostly). Time scales includes things like deadlines, scene allotments, working out how long it will take to set up cameras, get lighting correct, and so on. Working out timing is very important to a film as there's many deadlines and other people often have more than one job and have to do more than one thing in one day. Timing is a good thing, of course, because it instigates good organisation and gets things done efficiently in the minimum time necessary. On the other hand, meeting deadlines can be very difficult, especially when being a student with other assignments and subjects to be focusing on. 
• Personnel: Cast and crew. Personnel is a vast category as it covers everyone who is involved in a single scene, excluding experts on information. Personnel includes make-up artists, costume designers, actors, stunt persons, cameramen, catering, producers, directors, cinematographers, art designers, editors, still photographers, score mixers and so on. Having personnel can be a good thing, as it means that you don't have to do everything yourself and share the load, but it means more people to keep track of, more people to recruit and you have to find good quality designers for costume and make-up. 

An example of make-up used in Warm Bodies. Zombie make-up doesn't have to garishly gory! 

• Facilities: The school. While the school is our set location, it's also the place where we keep props, costume and it has a catering system and free toilets. Sometimes facilities are difficult to find as you often have to pay for them, but since I'm a student at the school and it contributes to my learning, it's unnecessary to pay. Sometimes, however, you can't always get the facilities you want, and have to look somewhere else instead. 
• Materials: Props. Materials is a very broad subject as well, mostly for props. Materials is basically whatever makes the scene more visually pleasing and realistic. Props in our scene, for example, would be the character's weapons (hockey sticks or something similar). Materials also includes cameras, the actual costumes, any additional lighting, etc. However, it can be confusing for the actors especially to work with so many props while saying their lines, and they'd need to be fixed, replaced, maintained and kept track of. 
• Contributors: Our teacher. A contributor is someone who is often an expert on something that is crucial to the plot or scene, or someone who can add something to the budget, or even help out in general without being directly involved. This is a benefit to having a contributor(s), but sometimes, they'll want to be paid.
• Locations: The school and its pavilion. As we're students, it's easier to use a set that we have access to anyway. For our film, the school is an easy place for our scenes as it can be creepy and has long corridors for filming. Locations can be anything from a school to a field, a museum to an apartment, a bus stop to a petrol station. The location is a very important factor of filming as it adds to the overall image and is often the part to be judged in a scene. Our location is good as we can set it there easily, but some places may be a little awkward in filming, such as trying to film from a corner in the changing rooms. 

Scenery from The Hobbit: The Unexpected Journey. Most of it was in New Zealand, like The Lord of the Rings, though nowadays, a lot of scenery is simply digitally added.

• Codes of Practice and Regulations: Permission from the headteacher, media teacher and on-site management. This is a crucial part of filming anything, as it keeps everything legal and copyrighted and safe. As we're simply a school project, the codes aren't as multiple as the bigger films would have to have. We'd need safety and permission to film in some areas as the most important legalities. However, sometimes in films, it's difficult to acquire the codes as some scenes are always dangerous, but sometimes it's simply a matter of making it as safe as they possibly can. In a big action film like World War Z, there would have to be a lot of safety regulations and many legal matters to take care of to even allow the movie to prepared for.

The traditional copyright symbol.