What are Some Non-Obvious Skills that Come in Handy for Indie Filmmakers? (QUORA)

By Scott Danzig (https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-non-obvious-skills-that-come-in-handy-for-indie-filmmakers/answer/Scott-Danzig?ref=forbes&rel_pos=3)


Rest assured, ANY skill can be useful for filmmaking, depending on the subject matter and needs of a production are. However, non-obvious skills that are consistently needed include:

Doomsday prepping

Anything can and will go wrong on your film set, so plan for it. Spare light bulbs, equipment breaking, actors and crew vanishing, locations disappearing, and yes, rain. Hurricanes and tornadoes! You’ve been warned! Now be ready for all of it.

Getting people to focus

SHADDAP!!! That’s how you need to say it. “Please be quiet” is too meek, and “SHUT UP ALREADY!”… well, it’s just rude! People know you’re being friendly yet stern when you tell em to SHADDAP!!! Say it fast and quick, whenever unnecessary conversation is interfering with progress on a film set. Even better is to just say “Quiet on the set!”, “Positions!” or “Is camera ready?”. Conversations will stop fast and hard.

But it’s not just that. I got a hard lesson from my cinematographer on a prior shoot when I was determined to reserve a particular parking spot in Brooklyn, because I wanted to record a car driving toward a particular tree. But I, as the director, was needed elsewhere, to make decisions. The assistant director took over, and was promptly booted away by an angry mother who wanted to park. I looked at the lost parking spot and cried deep within, but again, the cinematographer repeated, “FOCUS” and I got back to work finishing the shoot. The shot we came up with instead worked out just fine.

Thinking about safety

Putting a light on a stand at the right brightness and the right angle is not enough. Someone can trip on that light and knock it over. Or even more likely, the power cable. You need to put a sandbag or two on the light stand whenever it’s set up, and try to prevent people from tripping on the wires too. A light falling over can be dangerous, and it can seriously hurt your movie. Suddenly, instead of that daylight hitting the far wall thanks to that powerful yet now broken light, all the actors might need to crowd near the window, and it would just look awkward.

Color coordination

I looked around during one of the larger daily meetings for my software development team at work. Everyone… maybe 15 people… were wearing some variant of blue and black. Both those colors have their place in film, but you need to be a tad braver? While fashion sense is a big part of this, I’m also talking about set design, props, and the color scheme of the lights. If you ignore this, you’re missing an opportunity to leverage an important tool for visual storytelling.

Cognizance of speech patterns

I talk a certain way, and sometimes phrase things in ways that I find amusing. I do it out of habit, to make the day just a bit more enjoyable, and I don’t realize it until people point it out. One of the most consistent critiques I get for my screenwriting is “People don’t talk like that”. Some are better at identifying what language you’d expect to hear from your characters throughout the script. I’ve gotten better, but it’s not one of my stronger skills. I let as many people as I can find comment on my script and it quickly lets me fix such issues.

Estimating

By estimating, I’m not talking about how you can estimate the length of your edited film to be about one minute per page of your screenplay. I mean estimating the time it takes to actually shoot the raw footage. While it’s expected, during your first time directing, that you might have a 15 hour day or two, professionals will quickly draw the line if you assume it’s okay for the next shoot. You need to realize that each shot will take at least 15–20 minutes, and you need to account for more complicated lighting setup and anything else that could delay progress. I’d recommend you not plan on shooting more than 5 pages a day. Keep it at 3 a day max if you’re still learning the process. Filmmaking will be a lot more fun if you have time to think about things, experiment, and be creative.

Construction

There are a ton of Youtube videos on DIY projects for filmmaking equipment. Want a snorricam shot?

You can either buy a rig like that for a few hundred, or build it yourself. Dollies, silders, diffusion panels, etc, are all within your reach for cheap if you know your way around a hardware store. Also, you might handy enough to construct your own movie sets. How jealous I am when I see films that have custom-built sets, but if you’re handy, have at it!

Changing direction

Okay, something isn’t going to work out as well as you’d hope. You have the sorrowful eyes of your cinematographer locked with yours, and those eyes are telling you that you are not going to be able to film the shots you wanted. You have to figure out a way to connect the dots. Brainstorm. Throw eggs at the wall. Think about what you have, and what can work. Choose the one that makes you feel confident. There are answers out there! And also, you might invent penicillin! Recognize what COULD be possible, and if something worked out better, or differently than you’d have hoped, it might open up new opportunities. Yes, I like the way she looked in that take, suggesting that there really isn’t a gun in that house. Maybe the cat did it!

Maybe not…

Being good with children and animals

Speaking of which, sometimes you do have a cat in your film, or a baby. People are not going to like you upsetting either. If you want to include such a creature in your film, you have to know how to work with them. So being a cat person, or a very charismatic baby playmate, can be a godsend, when you just want to get one simple shot, but it’s just not happening. The cat keeps running away, or the baby keeps crying. Please, for the love of god, save the production and fix this!

Stage combat training

You don’t realize it at first, but there are tons of things a filmmaker can write into a script that is very unsafe. I had an older gentleman play the father that, unfortunately, has reached the end of his usefulness, and was expected to perform a ceremonial suicide. Of course, once he did, I needed him to collapse. We planned to put something soft under the rug, but it still wasn’t safe for him. We ultimately cut shots together, with a sound effect, to give a reasonable illusion of a fall, but if we had an actor with some training on how to do such a fall believably and safely, we could have gotten that shot resolved much faster.

Detecting ambient noises

I’ve recorded a bunch of sound in New York City. While I’ve gotten very clean recordings usually, it’s easy to mentally tune out background noise. Apparently, taking into account my recording experience and post-production sound issues, I’ve become more sensitive to hearing. On the last production I was a part of, I noticed sounds, without headphones, that apparently no one else on set were detecting. So apparently I have that skill. It’s useful. Otherwise you could have unwanted noise in your final film.

Acting

This is obvious to actors, but no one else. In order to know how to effectively direct actors, a director needs to have some experience with acting. What are they actually trying to do, and what helps them get there? It can be different from actor to actor, but if you learn to do it well enough to make an acting teacher happy (that’s my gold standard), then you’ll know enough to fix performances when they’re not sounding how you want them.

Graphic Design

For my last production, I wanted advertising posters on the wall, and needed a presentation of some sort. I knew something about Prezi, which makes for lively presentation, and also know my way around Photoshop. We also had cell phone displays and a company banner that also needed design. I was able to handle it all myself.

I also maintain my own Sneaky Ghost Films website, which helps for networking and promotion activities. Graphic design ability to the rescue! And for my next film, I’m going to need some sort of menu for a restaurant scene. It may very well end up as another graphic design task.

But again, the number of skills that can be of aid to a filmmaker are limitless. It’s simply up to the filmmaker to leverage their strengths to make the best film possible.