No compositing app has been around longer, has as large an installed base, and as much plug-in support. Though it’s only a half-point update, Adobe has added some important features that will ease many common text and animation tasks.
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Kalonica McQuesten is a San Francisco-based composer and music supervisor who has worked in theatre, film, and the recording industry. In this interview, she discusses her approach and methodology for scoring film.

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Apple’s long-awaited Motion graphics app provides a simple interface, real-time compositing and color correction, and an incredibly low-price. Though it lacks some high-end features such as a motion tracker and stabilizer, its a snap to create complex composites.
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Though it may not have the installed base of Adobe After Effects or Apple’s Shake, discreet’s Combustion has a loyal following of users who are drawn to its interface, excellent particle effects, low price and compatibility with discreet’s higher-end products.
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You’re shooting a low-budget commercial but aiming for a high-budget look. Professional commercials can have the highest cost per second of screentime of any type of production. You’re hoping to circumvent this by accepting a flat rate as writer-producer and by shooting in a very high-quality widescreen HDTV format and using a lot of special effects to make your commercial look slick, expensive and, hopefully, film-like. You are relying heavily on your director of photography, your visual effects supervisor and your sound designer to give your commercial the impact it needs. You have two actors and minimal location expenses since you’ll be shooting in the corporate headquarters

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Of all the job titles in entertainment, “producer” is the most misunderstood, mostly because there are several different types of jobs that fall under the heading “producer.” Producing jobs range from Executive Producer to Producer to Line Producer to Segment Produer to Show Producer. These jobs all have one thiing in common: they’re all in some way responsible for the budget, and therefore, the content and schedule, of all or part of a project.

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Union or Non-Union?

The main reason for becoming a union signatory, i.e. signing a labor agreement with a union or a guild, is so that you can hire members of that union for your production. Only medium to high budget movies can afford to use the labor unions like IATSE and the Teamsters. But many low budget projects use SAG actors and SAG has created several different agreements based on different sized budgets in order to make it easier for independent filmmakers to work with SAG actors. If you don’t sign an agreement, there’s still a chance that union crew members will work on your project but if the union finds out, they will most likely have to quit before the project is finished. The unions do not agressively hunt down low budget pictures, however, and if your project is fairly low-key, it is unlikely that you’ll have a problem with the union.

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Corporate projects are similar to documentaries but they often use a lot of materials created by graphic artists or broadcast designers, such as animated charts, company logos and so on. The creation of these elements should be set in motion early-on since it can take a long time to prepare these sections.

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Scheduling a documentary production is very different than scheduling a feature film. There are many sorts of documentaries but they usually contain some or all of the following elements:

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The first step in creating a shooting schedule for a feature film is to create a set of production boards. For decades, production boards done by hand but nowadays, the process is expedited by dedicated software like Movie Magic Scheduling.

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Before you start shooting your project, it is essential to determine a schedule. Even if your project is very small you will still be managing a lot of production elements, and in order to do that successfully, you’ll need to be organized and prepared. You may think that meticulous scheduling is only a concern on complicated, high-budget features, but you could also argue that the lower your budget, the more important a good schedule is because well-planned schedules can help you save time and money and keep your project from spiraling out of control creatively and financially. Unless you already have secure funding (and lots of it), it’s likely that your project will go through some transformations during the course of production and post-production.

We recently heard an interesting story of how one producer financed his independent film. Though this approach may not be practical or relevant to your situation, it’s a good example of some very creative financing. Thinking along these lines might help you come up with a "unique" financing scheme of your own.

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As with any business, the business of making a digital video projec t involves myriad contracts including releases, license agreements, deal memos, and deferred payment agreements to name just a few. Though this is definitely the realm of an entertainment lawyer, here are some basics.

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Many readers might think that bank loans, completion bonds and so on are out of their league. This is probably true if your project is not a feature film. But if your project is in the $1 million range, it’s very likely that you’ll end up with some combination of a distribution agreement and a bank loan.
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