A day in the life of a filmmaker

Okay so there are a lot of you in the Filmmaking forums that want to go to film school and grow up to be directors.

Here's what my day was like today. I just got hired on a movie to be a assistant production coordinator. Which basically means I'm the guy who handles the requests of the producer and the crews. If someone needs truck to pick up a prop, I'm the guy calling the transportation department. The whole thing involves a lot of paperwork and keeping records of who asked for what and when. Every piece of paper generated by the film will go through me and my office.

Okay so I'm working on this movie. Why? Because it's a great script? Because I want to be the production coordinator someday?

No. The answer is because it pays, I was qualified enough to get the job, and my friend put herself on the line to get me hired. That may sound cynical, but on every film there are only a few creative people, most are just doing what they're told and that's that. I took this job because I'm learning to be a better producer. There are a million things that go into producing a film, and I've only stumbled across a few hundred thousand of them. Being in this environment will help me learn for when I'm alone producing my own projects.

Getting back to my day today, we rented a suite of offices to be our base camp. A place where we could plan and carry out how we're going to make the movie. The offices were supposed to have phones preinstalled and furniture that we could use. Both of those things were not true. So we've been sitting in offices where we had to get a whole new phone system installed (actually it's being installed tomorrow) and we had to move all of the furniture out so we wouldn't lose a day of prep in a week.

It was a whole lot of hurry up and wait. And it's all pretty vital, because next week is going to be nuts with everyone in the film gathering at the office trying to put together their elements and make it into a whole film.

It's a horror film. I haven't read the script yet, just got it this evening.

I'm sure I'll ramble more about this stuff later.

-Kent