Week One

I have officially completed days one and two at Trevanna Post, and could not be happier with my choice in May Term! Yesterday, I commuted into the city with Mrs. Freed. We drove in, parked at Port Authority, took the E to Spring Street and began the day. For the first three hours, she graciously offered her time to explain the entire film-making process to me. She explained the details from Development and budgeting to production and then post production. I learned a lot of interesting facts about the movie industry. The process is never cut and dry and there is a lot of negotiating betwen the different departments. Mrs. Freed used a so-you're-building-a-house analogy to try and explain to me the process of making a movie. You start out with the idea...which can come from a studio, producer, book, magazine article, screenwriter, director, actor - pretty much anyone. From there, the necessary talent needs to be acquired, an assisstant directing team needs to outline a budget and all the while everyone needs to agree on everything. You have to choose whether you want to go big with Brad Pitt, the marble countertops of the film world, if you wanna go with people no one has heard of, or a healthy mix of the two. These decisions need to be made for the actors and actresses, directing team, photographer, costume designer, makeup artist, and absolutely every other team that works on a movie. You call all of these people the talent. Once all the talent, or the house's amenities, have been chosen, you move onto the Break Down phase. This is when an assistant director sits down the the script and breaks it into the various settings in the film. From these categories, the assistant director decides how many days each scene in each location will take to film. From this break down, the pre-production team comes up with a plan. This plan is called the budget. This document includes an extremely detailed "account" (no pun intended) of every single expense that will be included in the movie's budget. The Above-the-Line costs include the story rights, production and directing teams, the cast, and the living arrangements if necessary. Everything else is included in the below the line costs. This includes the production costs (everything that needs to be paid for during shooting), and the post-production costs. During this introduction to the process of movie-making I learned something very interesting about state governments and their cooperation with the film industry. In about a dozen states, there are enormous tax credits, or incentives, that are menat to draw movies into states. Basically, this happens because the state governments recognize that a movie being made in their state will bring a ridiculous amount of jobs to the locals, giving these states more paychecks to tax. In some states, there are incentives of up to 30%. This means that for a movie that takes 20 million dollars to make, the state will give them up to 6 million dollars back simply because the movie was made in that state. Some states that have the best tax credits are New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and somewhat surprisingly, Louisiana. Because the crews and departments that work on movies, like the scenic managers, are so good at their jobs, nowadays it doesn't really matter where you film, as long as the setting looks like what you want the viewer to see. So, you could be watching a movie about Alaska that is filmed in a lake in Massachusetts, like they did in The Proposal, and the viewer would never even know it. But because they made the movie in MA, the makers receive a huge tax credit that is deducted from the budget and creates the net budget. We often watch the news after a blockbuster hits the theaters and hear a reporter say that the budget for a movie was 80 million dollars or some equally unfathomable number. But what the public doesn't know is, 1. the number they are telling you isn't actually a "budget"...the budget is the PLAN, not what is ultimately spent. That number they talk about is the EFC, or estimated final cost and 2. this "budget" or EFC includes every little expense involved in a movie. The director's lunch total for the 8 weeks of filming, the hotel that the crew needecd to stay in on location, the car rentals, light rentals, airfare, on-location water supply, hair dresser, dialogue coach, and the other endless number of things that must be thought of in the plan. So, yes, 80 million dolars is a very big number. But in reality, it's not just the amount they spent filming...it's the story rights, toll expenses crossing bridges, and actors' trailer rentals as well. After Mrs. Freed explained this whole process in great detail to me, using examples of real movies, etc., she went on to begin to talk about what it is she does. The post-production phase of a movie involves the picture, music, and sound editing, special effects, and titles. Post-production accounting happens once the film has been filmed on the locatiosn. Their job in post-production is to make a "reel-able" which means "showable" or final product movie. They take the raw materials and make something like The Avengers, which was shot in New Mexico and Arizona (fun fact). The accounting that they do in post-production not only involves paying and distributing the budgeted funds to all the parties involved in a film, but they also determine the amount of money that the talent will be paid for the rest of the project's life which could be anywhere from 10 to 100 years. To try and put this in perspective, think about every time you see The Godfather on cable TV. Each and every time it is shown, the talent from that film receives a residual payment that is based on a percentage the post-production team generated back when the Godfather was filmed. The directors, producers, actors, and assistants from that film, and often the original owner of the story rights, are paid residuals for the rest of the project's life. So basically, they never stop profitting for their contribution to the film. Post-production is predominately responsible for managing the "negative cost" of a film..the cost that is required to create the negative that is shown in the theatre, or goes straight to cable TV or DVD. So after learning this huge amount of information, Mrs. Freed had me sit down and actually go through an entire budget for a movie (whose title I am not at liberty to discuss). The document is 80 pages of pure numbers, accounting for absolutely every little detail that must be thought of in the film-making process. Mrs. Freed asked me to go through the document in its entirety and try to understand each and every item that goes into the development, production and post-production of a film. After three hours in which I was only able to treck through 40 pages of the document, I began to grow a deep admiration for the assistant directors and pre-prodcution teams who make this superhuman Excel sheet. It may also be important to mention that this 80 page budget is for a pretty low budget and small fil, an indie of sorts. I cannot even begin to imagine the time and detail necessary for many of the movies we see in theatres and love so dearly...the ones that require 80 million dollars, not 5. Next week, Jessi (Trevanna Post's other intern) and I will be working on the actual residual chart for the talent in Men in Black 3. Could not be more excited!