My Role(s) in our Feature Film

   Our Feature Film The Hidden has been a huge success! With a sold-out theatre and an evening of fun planned, it can easily seem that most things went smoothly in order to create a project on the scale that we did. However, there were many issues between people's ideas a suggestions and some of these things often slowed the process and resulted in arguments.

   In terms of my role as Second Assistant Director, I had duties that included making call sheets, asking for the crew's availability, sometimes making schedule breakdowns, and lots of other things involving Pre-Production. For about half of our filming days, I worked as Boom Operator when others on the sound crew could not be there.

   The article from No Film School suggests that if you anticipate working on a directing team with multiple people, it's important that the group sets boundaries so that each person knows what they are expected to do in their set role. I think that it would have been beneficial for us to communicate more on what our roles entailed because, in my opinion, our director took over a lot of the assistant director responsibilities and we ended up not doing much for the film in the beginning. I understand why he wanted to start off doing things by himself because we have similar personalities, but those duties weren't apart of his role and he should have focused more on being with actors while the First Assistant Director and I worked on call sheets and scheduling.

   Also, the author pointed out that listing our personal strengths and weaknesses to the group would help with designating certain responsibilities. Each director was different on our crew and we were interested in doing different things, so it would have helped to know that someone would not be able to perform their best on a certain task. Especially with our first few days on set, knowing our strengths and weaknesses ahead of time would have eliminated our confusion on what we had to do on set.

   With these tips from the article, I think that I can improve my communication skills with others before we get into the whole process. Although I don't want to participate in making a feature film next year, I still think these skills will be extremely valuable for working with others on any project and learning how to collaborate efficiently and effectively.


https://nofilmschool.com/2014/10/horror-director-duo-soska-sisters-how-to-avoid-collaborative-nightmares