Film Craft 101: The Producer - 01. Introduction

Hi, I'm Michael Wohl. This course is going to give you an inside look into the varied tasks that fall under the producing side of filmmaking. Now, I find that often in many smaller independent productions, no one explicitly gets assigned the job title of producer. And all the other jobs in the producer's camp are frequently ignored as well. The person who's the prime mover behind the project usually assumes the role of director and doesn't realize that she's actually doing both the producing and the directing simultaneously. But the producer's tasks are fundamental to any production. Someone needs to decide to shepherd the project forward, figure out how it's going to be paid for, assemble and hire the cast and crew, manage the budget, establish a shooting schedule and execute it, and then make sure everyone's going to get fed and that there's a toilet nearby. Look, don't laugh. Few things are as important when nature calls. Someone needs to be checking the weather to make sure that you're not going to get rained out and ensure that you have all the permissions to film at your location. Somebody's got to see to it that the cast and crew know when they're going to go and when they have to show up and who's going to be the person to call when someone inevitably gets lost. And most importantly, someone has to go up on stage to receive that Best Picture award. That's right. It's the producer who receives the Best Picture Oscar because ultimately it's really the producer who's responsible for the movie. And in fact, that's a great way to think of it. Each person on set is responsible for a particular job, but the producer's responsibility is to get the movie made at all. Now, the bigger your project, the more you can divide up these production responsibilities. On big feature films, there are often dozens of different people doing different parts of the producer's job. And with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, that makes sense. You want to make sure that there's a lot of eyes watching that money and making sure it's being spent properly and appropriately. But even on smaller productions, it's often very helpful to divide up the producer's role into a number of different people. For example, if you've got a project that's shooting across multiple days, you're going to want to have someone on set making sure that the day is going smoothly, but simultaneously, you're going to want to make sure that there's someone paying attention to what's going to happen tomorrow and make sure everything's ready for that.