LO1: Production Job Roles

Task 1

My selected media field and organisation is Film. I have chosen this as I am very interested in film and think that there are a variety of roles in the field that can be discussed and partaken in. Film has had a huge impact on society and the media since its beginnings around the early 1900’s and continues to captivate audiences through a number of genres. I have always enjoyed film and television and the idea of storytelling through motion pictures. Filmmakers such as Sergio Leone and Quentin Tarantino heavily inspired me to take film further and pursue a career in the field. The roles I will be investigating are the film director and the editor, as they are both key roles in filmmaking and vital in the creation of film.

In the Film industry, producing a full motion picture takes many job roles to successfully do, including producers, directors, screenwriters, cinematographers, editors and cameramen.

Task 2

In Film I will be looking into two roles within that media field, these are Director and Editor.

Directing

A film director is the person who controls what should happen in the creation of a film to create their preferred vision of how the motion picture should look. It is their duty to monitor what goes on on the film set, how the actors should act, how it is filmed, edited and produced in order to create their preferred image. The role of Film Director is sometimes considered the most important and vital job in film, and are the people who control everything that happens in front of and behind the camera.

 The director uses written communication to create storyboards and shot plans (sometimes writing) to envision their work before directing the film crew on set once pre-production has been completed. 

Directors have to have good communication skills when on set to achieve their wanted vision of the film, addressing the actors on how they should work and act and how the cameramen should shoot the film, to create a preferred meaningful performance. The director has to be artistic yet practical. They need to have good ideas yet do anything on set to motivate the crew to do the job right. Directors can sometimes come across as very demanding, but are sometimes required to to create the perfect sequence. 

Directors need to have a good knowledge of the camera in order to create a successful film - they need knowledge of the different types of shots used in film, and how different techniques can alter connotations and mise-en-scene. Directors often carry their own camera for planning shots and how they should look. Though it is not all simple enough for them to envision whatever they want and have it shot, they need to still realistically stay within the boundaries of the film’s budget which will be organised by the Producer, so this can often be a challenge for the director if one particular sequence may cost a lot to produce.

Though other key elements are vital to a film’s success such as editing, producing and cinematography, directing is considered the most important in terms of the creation and innovation involved in film. Directors are often referred to as the “author” of a film, as they project their own visual thoughts and ideas onto the screen. Some notable film directors include Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee and James Cameron. 

Skills needed

Director's need to have a good set of communication skills to successfully direct a film. As well as this they need to be organised with the cast and crew, focused, but more importantly creative. Director's need to have a good vision for how they see the film and use their skills to make this happen on the screen.
Directors also need to be technically skilled with the camera and oversee the cinematographers, which means they must know what equipment they are dealing with.


Contribution

Director's have a very large contribution into the making of a film. They are sometimes viewed as the most important role in filmmaking, due to them being the one who chooses how the film will look on set, but other roles such as producing, editing and cinematography are all also vital to a film's success. Director's are responsible for making sure the entire crew are working up to standard on the set of a film and will go over takes after takes to make sure a certain scene or passage is filmed correctly.

Equipment

A "Viewfinder" which helps determine the angle, frame rate and scope of what the camera filming the scene will be set to. This helps the director know what they want for their vision of the film.

For some larger areas where the crew could be filming, director's often use a megaphone to address to the cast and crew orders on what to do if it is a long distance between the cast and the crew.

Editing

Film editing is an important part of the creative post-production process of filmmaking. It is the activity of taking all the rushed raw footage from the shooting of the film and cutting it down into smaller shots and combining them into multiple exposures and sequences matching the director’s storyboards. Film editing is described as an art form, and takes precision and a lot of patience to achieve. Editors can create expansive or fast cuts, and can have just as much of an effect on the audience as certain camera shots do on set without the audience even noticing the editor’s work. The editor’s role isn’t to just simply put pieces of film together, but to creatively and coherently piece together dialogue, images, story, music, the pace of the film, and to generally re-imagine and almost rewrite the film in terms of these elements. In some cases, the director of a film also edits his own - some examples include the Coen Brothers and Akira Kurosawa.

In earlier days, editing was much harder than it is now. Editors would have to physically cut down and splice the film reel into each other, which was very time-consuming and less cost-efficient than the digital age that came which completely changed editing and made things much easier. One of the first films to be edited and feature multiple exposures was Scrooge in 1901, a silent black and white drama film that has a duration of 6 minutes and 20 seconds. 

Nowadays editors use digital software such as Adobe Premiere, Avid, Final Cut and Sony Vegas on PC and Mackintosh computers. These softwares now store all the footage from digital cameras directly and are cut down on computers using these softwares.
Editors need to be extremely patient and organised, making sure all the footage is there for them to cut down and edit and make sure they all follow the storyboard and script.

In comparison to directors, editing is much more technical and less communicative. An editor is responsible for taking the footage from the actual shoot and rearranging the cuts, which takes a lot of patience and time. Editors tend to work alone and not in a team, rather than a film director who needs to be consistently cooperative with the cast and crew.

Equipment

Modern editors tend to work using Macs or PCs, using softwares such as Adobe Premiere Pro or Final Cut.

Comparison

Both a director and editor are quite equally important roles into the production of a film, yet are both very different in certain ways. While both work creatively and artistically, visually making their images come to life, the job process for both differ practically and technically.
A director has a much more cooperative role in the industry, having to communicate with everyone on set of a film and make sure that the roles are carried out professionally and to his or her preferred image.
An editor can be described as taking the ingredients of a film and "cooking" them, splicing all the pieces of a film together to make a large, transitional sequence. This also means an editor works much less verbally to a director, working alone a lot of the time and not on a large practical set.

References:

http://www.filmtools.com/shopbytrade/directors.html

http://www.mediacollege.com/employment/film/director.html

http://www.prospects.ac.uk/film_video_editor_job_description.htm

http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/film-editor1.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAK3aUq25fo