Since thesis films have started, there’s been some confusion as to what the difference is between the Unit Production Manager (UPM) and Second Assistant Director (Second AD), both first year jobs. On F3s, there was only a Second AD and everything seemed to work out alright. So what does the UPM do?
There’s the official job [...]

Just got back from watching the dailies from the first show I worked on. Everyone that works on the show is required to attend, no matter what their position, mainly so we can associate what happened on set and how everything was set up with what the final picture looks like.
Dailies is actually a pretty [...]

I had another Director’s Prep today and discovered a formality that I never knew existed. This prep was considerably longer than the last one I attended being that it’s a double show, and a quite unique double show at that.
It’s being co-directed, co-written, co-shot, and co-edited by two students who decided to team up. [...]

Within about an hour of this morning’s post, I get a phone call from the UPM of the other thesis film that’s been shooting since last Thursday asking if I’d like to be an extra because a bunch of their extras didn’t show. “Suuure” (I was also kind of hungry and wanted to score some [...]

For thesis films we get three days of shooting. The original plan for the thesis I was working on was to shoot the final scene today, but it would have only been half a day since the actors had to leave by noon. Instead, we finished early last night so the decision was made to [...]

Continuing with the Art Directing pre-production for my first thesis film, I went with some of the main crew members the other night to check out a location we were shooting at to see what kind of props we would need to get. Luckily, not that many.
The Director wants a mostly black and white room [...]

The Director’s Prep was a lot shorter and painless than people had made it out to be (maybe because this is a fairly simple film). On the administrative side, the Head of Production, Cinematography, Screenwriting, and Editing teachers attended. Crew wise, it was the Producer, Director/Writer, 1st Assistant Director, 2nd Assistant Director, Unit Production Manager, [...]