Design Overview
If making a feature length movie, with a huge budget potential, and a pool of resources that are highly skilled and talented, you still have to come up with a design or vision. Otherwise, there's nothing to make. Resources and good intentions can only take you so far. It's not very different with other types of projects. If you're going to videotape a football game, someone has to decide on camera angles, how close to zoom, what pace and detail in dialog will you inject, will there be a separate introduction? Who's going to wrap it up? Are you going to include interviews?
That's not a complete list of questions, but you get the idea. Someone has to take charge, make the decisions, and see that they get executed. That's part of the vision thing. Seeing it in your mind's eye before anyone else does.
If the producer is the person who organizes all the pieces to have a project come to life in the first place, it's the director who is called upon to envision the final product. On small projects, of course, you can be both these rolls. The larger it gets, the harder it is likely to be if you want to do it all.
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Discussion
We get into a small amount of technical detail in this section, but in general, this is about what you'll face when making decisions about design. Technical nits and grits will really be better covered in other sections. Here are the general areas of discussion...
- In The Studio
- In The Field
- Lighting
- Script Polishing
In The Studio
In some ways, an in-studio project has the benefits of good control, limited options, and a proven track record. You should have excellent control of lighting and acoustics and fairly good control of props and staging. Your talent with have less room to roam about, so your decisions about camera angles will be limited, but based on what's worked before. You may follow a well worn formula adding in creativity as content. As there are some limits, you may not have the expressive and elaborate production you envisioned...but, with fewer options, designs can be done quickly and you'll be more assured of having done the right things.
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In The Field
The sky's the limit! ...and, sometimes, that's the problem. If you have too many options, you could end up with a similar problem - too many of them. Designing outside or on location has to take into consideration the same things as in the studio but with more variability in the mix. Make the wrong decision and things will break down quickly. Plan ahead, plan well...but what to plan?
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Lighting Design
Lighting technology is explained in another section. However, when looking at the design of your project, you will need to decide on things that touch upon emotions. You'll use technology to get the effects you want, but the effects need to support the "feel" you're going for.
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Script Polishing
You may think that a script is only useful for a movie style project. But this isn't really true. Some form of script is essential for almost any project. If it's a simple effort, and all you need to do is gather together to agree on what will be said or done, then that's script polishing at a rudimentary level. On the other hand, a more elaborate project requires some sort of written instructions - perhaps even down to specific dialog - to ensure that everyone is on the proverbial, and literal page.
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Details
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