IMP Director chronicles- Working with a larger team/Giving up roles

 

As I have mentioned many a time, I have been lucky enough to be able to work with a variety of talented people. However, I have also had to do many jobs on my own. More often than not, whether it's for financial reasons, time reasons or just reasons you have to be a one man band, doing everything by yourself. You are director, producer, 1st AD, camera-op, focus puller, gapher all rolled up into one package. Working like this does give you a good, broad knowledge of each job role, however, it also means you become extremely self reliant on a film-set. A trait which can be hard to break.

This is where the IMP comes in. I pitched and successfully got the role of director for the up coming short film, Scribes. However, this left me in an odd position. All I had to do was to focus on one job, that means focusing on one thing on set instead of everything big and small. This created possibly the biggest problem I had on set. Letting things go to other people. Everyone has there own way of doing certain jobs and when your used to having something done your way, it can be hard to let someone else do it their way.

As a director, a film is your baby. You care for it, feed it, have sleepless nights because of it, but despite all the hardship you still love it pieces. Trusting other people on the crew is like letting them care for you baby. Your terrified they will do something to hurt it. The was a big problem for me on set. Although I knew all the crew as friends, I hadn't worked with them on a full functioning set. In many senses, it was like letting strangers hold your baby and your stood there petrified there going to drop it.

However, being a good director is knowing when to let someone do their job. This allows you to focus solely on the task at hand, working with the actors to hon in the right performance. Once I got passed letting over people care for my child, it was a fantastic experience. Communicating with each department and knowing they knew exactly what they were doing really calmed my concerns.

For me, the thing that comes to mind about the shoot was keeping everything on track. It was very much down to myself and James my producer to keep everyone on target and on time. We only had a day to shoot pretty much the whole film so it was vital that we got everything we needed done. That is the challenge with working with a larger crew, more people to keep motivated.

 

 So which do I prefer working with, big or small crews? For me, it hands down has to be big crews. The pros so heavy out way the cons that there is simply no competitions. Being able to just focus on one job role instead of many was a liberating experience that I learnt so much from. If had the luxury, I would use a larger crew over a smaller one on everything I did.