Production

Well, there's not a heck of a lot of advice I can give on this. Every production will have a unique set of problems that will have to be solved in a unique way. Experience and adaptability are the main things that carry you through in times of trouble. The thing I strongly recommend is: have fun and keep a little perspective. When it comes down to it, you are just making a movie. It's for entertainment. No one's going to die if you do something wrong, in fact doing things wrong is part of the learning process. Creating an environment that's as stress-free as possible is difficult, but ideal in my opinion. Getting everything done properly doesn't necessarily require an iron fist, especially if you've chosen dedicated people to work with. If everyone's having fun and the team spirit is maintained, there isn't anything that can't be overcome with hard work and creativity.

For example, due to a technical difficulty, all of our sound for our first day's shooting turned out to be completely unusable. This is a tragedy on any production, let alone one with only four days for principle photography. So we made up an emergency "splinter unit" (anyone who would help us out on a Friday night) and shot all the stuff in our second location in five hours with artificial daylight. Then we spent the day we'd scheduled for that stuff shooting the lost footage. The performances turned out better than those on the first day, and the one scene we couldn't redo we ended up doing ADR (Automatic Dialogue Replacement) but without the "Automatic". The actors had to lip-synch without technological aid, an extremely difficult task. In the end it came out better than we'd expected and everyone learned something as well. This is just one example of how catastrophe can be contained with teamwork, perseverance and creativity.

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