Behind the Jargon of the Film Industry

In fact, there are a lot of times when there's actually more film production going on in my home state than in California, and the reason for that is largely economic in nature, Georgia has created tons of tax incentives for film and television projects that make it cheaper to shoot here in Georgia than in other places, and the fact that we have a major airport, which is in fact the world's busiest airport, probably doesn't hurt either. Practically every week I pass at least one film crew in

production somewhere in the city. Uh. In fact, just between my house and work, there are a lot of different locations that have been used for various film shoots. I rarely know what film they're working on because they typically use codes to designate the projects and they aren't obvious references to the film, but I do know that right across from my own house, I've had movies like Goose Bumps, Hunger Games, Baby Driver, and Bad Boys three Shoot there.

You can even see my house in the background of a couple of those movies. But anyway, that got me to thinking about the terminology of film and film sets

and how that relates to technology. And you could argue this is a little tangential, but I really love digging into this and kind of demystifying what all those roles do, because you if you ever sit through the credits of a film and actually paid any attention at all to them, you've probably seen some job titles that might have been a little confusing, like key grip or gaffer or the

famous best Boy. Maybe you've wondered about the difference between producers and executive producers or directors, and there are lots of phrases and words used on set that could be a little bit confusing. I'll do another episode in the future about some of the terminology that film folks use, but today we're really going to explore the origin of the names for various roles the cast and crew of films.

Now to give you the bad news early. In many cases, the origin for those words hasn't really been well documented. There are a lot of theories, for example, where best boy comes from, but those theories range from plausible to what is more likely a best guest or maybe wishful thinking. So let's take a look at the terms to describe the people who work on films. Some of this is gonna be really simple stuff. Some of it you probably already know, and some of it might be new to you.

So here we go. Let's start with the executive producer or executive producer's role. Now, if you were to compare a movie with a company, you could say the executive producer is like the CEO of the company. It's the job of the executive producer to hire or more likely oversee the hiring of producers, directors, and the talent that's going to star in a film. Uh, they might be more connected to the film and serve other roles. It's possible for an executive producer to also do something else,

maybe direct the film, maybe a writer. In the case of some of the Marvel films, you occasionally see some of the actors listed as executive producers. On the other hand, you could have executive producers that never visit a set at all, that have no connection to a movie once it starts shooting. Rather, they're managing multiple projects back in the home office of the movie studio. They also are

often in charge of getting funding for a film. Now, on an independent film, an executive producer might be funding the film largely through their own assets. They might be personally funding that movie. But in other cases you might have executive producers who are whining and dining potential investors

to fund the production of a film. They're usually in charge of making sure that the money needed to pay for the production is available, and they're also the ones you do not want to take off if you have to go and tell people that your film is going over budget, because that means you're gonna have to ask for more money than The executive producers are the ones in charge of it, and they might have some pretty tough questions for you as to why your film is

costing more than it was projected. Now, not all films have executive producers. Some only list producers in their titles, and they can do many of the same roles that executive producers follow. However, producers tend to be on set. They don't always appear on set, but a lot of them do work day to day on set supervising the production of the film, making sure things are going well and that nothing unexpected as happening that could impact the timing of the film or, because time is money, the

budget of the film. All department heads in a film production ultimately report up to the producer, and the producer also works with the director to try and make the director's vision a reality, or in some cases, the producer will work with the director in order to talk that director out of an idea that could be too expensive

or too difficult to pull off. The producer also is in charge of making sure other departments are operating within that budget that's set for the film on that day to day basis, and the producer is involved through the entire process all the way from pre production before any film is shot at all, to the distribution of the

movie to theaters. Some film projects are really really big and require multiple producers, particularly if there are different crews that are filming in separate parts of the world, so you can have co producers who are all of the same level. They are sharing producer credit, so it's not like one producer is over the others, but they're all overseeing different parts of a production. You can also have

an associate producer or line manager. These are sort of the next in command, kind of the lieutenants of the producers. They oversee specific tasks, usually designated by the producer, so they they If you don't like the lieutenant analogy, you can think of them as a vice president of a company. So they might oversee a secondary film crew that's capturing

footage that's going to be inserted into the film. You know, a film crew that's going to be focusing on stuff that doesn't require the director or any of the main talent of the movie to be in it. A line producer tends to be the person specifically supervising the budget of a film, so they're very much taking a close look at the numbers. You can also have task manager producer who are in charge of specific parts of a project,

and then you also have coordinating producers producers. Their job is to make sure everyone involved in the production of a film remains instep and informed of what's going on, so that no one is left behind. If something changes or there needs to be a shift in scheduling or anything like that. A production manager, for example, is in charge of supervising the production budget to the various departments, and that includes scheduling of crew and equipment and covering

crew salaries. They report their needs to the line producer, who then make sure that those needs are met or comes up with a really good reason why they can't do that. There are also production secretaries. These are people who assist with paperwork and administration needs. And there are production designers who work with the director to get a sense of what will be needed to achieve the director's

artistic vision. And at the bottom of the production hierarchy, you have production assistance who perform basic tasks for the production side, such as distributing hand radios to the various departments or running errands for the production staff. Um they don't tend to run errands for anybody else. They're specifically

meant for the production staff side. So you can think of the the sides of a film being the production side, which is talking, you know, all the stuff that's necessary to make sure everybody else has what they need to make the movie. You have the the creative side, which would be like the director and all the talent, and then you have all the crew who are doing the actual physical work to support that. So you kind of

have like these three columns in a way. Now I've mentioned the director a couple of times, but what does the director actually do. Well, that's the person who is the lead creative artist on set. So ideally the director sets the vision for the film. Was the film going to look like, what is the tone going to be? What sort of reaction is the film supposed to evoke from the audience. So ideally, if someone is watching the film,

how should they feel from scene to scene? You know, if it's a horror movie, you need to feel uneasy and fear and tension. If it's a comedy, you need some tension offset by laughter which relieves that tension. These sort of ideas. So the director is the person who says this is my goal, here's how I'm going to achieve my goal, and then has to communicate that out to other departments in order to make that a reality. They're also in charge of directing the talent to get

the performance the director has in mind. Talent is the word used to describe all the actors in a in a film. Um, it's also the word that tends to be used to describe me as a podcaster, and I find it funny to be referred to as the quote unquote talent, but that's just an industry term. So the directors are in charge of making sure the actors are giving the performance that the director had in mind in

order to create the movie that they want to make. UM. They work closely with the heads of the other creative departments to achieve this specific vision, and they might work very closely with the writer in some cases calling for script revisions. If the director feels that they need to move in a in a different way to achieve the overall goal, they might say, well, our goal is to creep out the audience because this is a horror movie.

But this scene is messing things up because it's it's changing up the pacing, it's I want to keep increasing tension, and this one kind of relieves the tension in a in a point where I don't want that to happen. Let's do a rewrite that can happen. The director will frequently work well beyond the filming stage and even have a hand in the editing department. That's a pretty big

departure from how directors work in live stage theater. Typically, if you're talking about stage production, you know, a play or a musical or something like that, the director will step way once the show opens. So the director is heavily involved with a theatrical show all the way up until opening night and then tends to step back, and at that point the management of the show largely falls

to the stage manager. But with a film, even after all the performances have been completed, after everything's been captured on film or digital video, directors will often play a part because so much of a movie can be shaped in the editing department. And I'll talk about editing more

at the end of this episode. Now you've probably also seen credits for things like assistant director, often shortened to a D. You might have seen first a D and second a D. Now, these aren't assistants to the director. They're not like running off to grab coffee or anything.

They're rather very important members of the creative team. And typically it's the first assistant director's job to take a shooting script, break it down into scenes, and then create a shooting schedule in an attempt to build the most efficient production approach as possible, which is why films are typically shot out of sequence, which means they're not filmed in the same chronological order as the scenes play out

when you watch the finished movie. So you could go and watch a movie and you might see an opening scene that was actually shot months after the final scene of the movie. Uh. You know, it doesn't play out that way when you watch it, but that's how it

was produced. During filming, the first assistant director determines the shooting order, and again, the goal is mostly to figure out what's the most efficient means for us to make this movie because time is money, So one way the first a D might do this is to take note of all the locations needed in the script and try to group similar scenes, like scenes they're set in the same location together so that over the course of several days, the crew and talent can knock those scenes off the

shoot list, and once it's done, assuming that they have their confident that they're done with that location, they can reich that's set and uh and not have to worry about again, and that gives other crew members time to build and dress the other sets that are going to be needed. In upcoming scenes and have that way to go as soon as the first group is done. Now, this isn't always possible. Sometimes two scenes in the same

set rely on drastically different set dressing. For example, if you have a big action movie in which characters are in one location before something catastrophic happens, like a massive explosion, and then you might revisit that scene later in the movie, well, obviously that's going to look dramatically different, so you may not shoot those two sequences back to back. You may

have a break between while you're changing out the set. Now, the first a d also helps manage the schedule for the talent, the crew, and the equipment needed each day. You're gonna hear this said over and over again because this is a huge endeavor. If you're talking even for a small film, it's a big it's a big issue.

But for really big movies, you need a lot of people working together to organize all this stuff because you're just looking at a massive number of people, a large amount of equipment, potentially tons of props and costume pieces. So it's a it's a big endeavor, and when it comes to time to shoot the big action scene, everyone

needs to know who needs to show up and win. Now, the second assistant director works with the first a D to achieve those goals, and it often falls to the second a D to create what are known as call sheets, and a call sheet is a list of all the people needed on any given day of shooting. So you check the call sheet and if your name is on there, you know that you need to show up that day. And typically you have a call time as well, what time you need to be on set ready to go

and uh, that's when you are called to do your job. Now, I mentioned that the director is the lead creative artist on a project, but usually big films will have other important department heads that could have just as big a role, sometimes an even bigger role on the final look and feel of a film. Them their job is to do what takes to achieve the goal that the director has set out, but they can create their own stamp on

a film's feel. So if you follow the industry, you will see names of people who haven't necessarily directed films, but have taken one of these positions. You know, in lots of films, you know they've headed up at department and they've developed a reputation and you can see their impact from the different movies they've worked on. A big one of those would be the director of photography. It's the director of photography, which usually is UH shortened to

either d O P or even more frequently DP. It's the director of photography's job to oversee the overall visual look of the film. So they take the director's idea of what the movie needs to be, like what what what does it need to convey? And they take the script and they determine what is going to be needed to create the best representation of the director's vision on the film or digital video that's actually shot on set.

So they might recommend which cameras should be used, which lenses should be installed on those cameras, how the shots should be framed, which scenes maybe should have camera movement in them. They'll work with a team to design all of these things. UH. They will determine how cameras should move. If a camera is deemed like this, this is a scene that needs to have some kinetic motion to it. We need we need to have the camera itself the point of view changing as this scene unfolds. They have

to figure out how does that work? How should that actually come across. They're also the head of the camera crew, and they work with another person called the gaffer, who is sort of the head of the electrical and lighting crew. In fact, before I go to a break, let me explain a gaffer's job and the most probable origin for the name gaffer. Now, the gaffer is the chief lighting technician and chief electrician on a film set. The gaffer works very closely with the director of photography to come

up with a lighting plan for each scene. Because the director of photography knows where the camera should be placed, with the angle and what is important in the scene, so the gaffer has to figure out with that how to light the scenes so that the important stuff gets the focus of the audience. The goal of the gaffer is to take all this information of camera framing and movement and then make the lighting so that the actual effect is possible. Now, the name gaffer is one of

those that still has a little mystery to it. In UK slang, gaffer is used for godfather or sometimes grandfather, and it's often a term that's just used as a

general way of saying old man. But that's probably not why it's used in film a lot of people argue that the name actually comes from lamp lighters back in the old gas lamp days, where they would have to go from lamp to lamp in the streets of a city such as London and turned the lamps on went started getting dark, and turned the lamps off when it

started to get bright again. And to do that they would use these poles that would have a hook at the end to be able to either light or extinguish a lamp, and those poles were called gaffs, So they used gaff poles. You could say that the person using it was a gaffer. And a lot of those lamp lighters apparently also worked in theaters in England. They would light the lights in the theater so that when the audience comes inside to your indoor theater, they can actually

see what's going on. And because the gaffer is the head lighting technician, the name was transferred over to the film world and they typically oversee the entire electrical department. Now I've got some more terms to cover as soon as we come back, but first let's take a quick break. And before I continued down the road with lighting, let's jump back to photography for a second, so director of Photography is ahead of the department, but there are a

lot of other jobs in that group. There are the camera operators who physically control and operate cameras during the filming process. Uh. The camera operators work very closely with the director of photography, essentially kind of following the director of Photography's instructions to make sure cameras are where they're supposed to be and they move the way they're supposed to. Some sets employ specialty operators, such as aerial camera operators.

This might be someone who controls a camera that's mounted on an airplane or in a helicopter, or it might be someone controlling a drone with a camera on it. And you also have other camera operators like jib arm or crane camera operators. As the name suggests, they control a camera that's mounted on the end of a movable arm to get shots from typically high elevation, to get sort of these sweeping, established, establishing shots in a film that typically is used on on jibs or cranes. Then

there's steadicam operators. I did an episode about steadicams. I'm pretty sure, but it was a long time ago. But just to go over what that is. These are rigs that allow operators to capture smooth handheld camera shots. They free up a director to capture images that otherwise would have been really difficult or maybe even impossible to get so.

Before the steadicam, the solution to moving a camera through a scene, like actually physically having the camera move through action was typically you were using if you're moving around the horizontal plane, you would lay down tracks and you would mount the camera on a moving platform called a dolly that would physically be moved by members of the crew.

The dolly would allow cameras to get this sort of smooth lateral motion, but it meant you were restricted to the path of the tracks, and moreover, you had to make sure the tracks weren't really visible on camera, or it kind of ruined the illusion of fantasy. Now. In fact, there's a movie I can tell you to watch if you want to catch a little glimpse of this, Terry

Gilliam's movie The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. There's this sequence in which the main character of the film is supposed to be executed, and the camera starts with a shot of Baron Munchausen as he stands at the execution block, and the camera starts to pull back, and it keeps pulling back further and further and further through dozens of

ranks of soldiers, one after another. It seems almost impossible how far back this camera pulls until it's at the gates of the city itself, looking through all these people at the execution block. It's a really impressive shot. But if you pay attention, you actually see that the actors in that scene are moving in from the sides as the camera moves backward. And the reason they're doing that is to you not just make it look really impressive, but also to obscure the fact that there are Dolly

tracks on the ground. And if you look at the ground as the camera's pulling back, occasionally you'll catch a glimpse of those Dolly tracks. Now, the steadicam freed up the camera operator to move through a scene with a camera with no tracks at all and keep the motion smooth, so the picture doesn't jerk around a lot the way it would if the camera were just being held by the operator. In recent years, we've seen a lot of that sort of jerky cam handheld action that that became

sort of an aesthetic. Recently, and by recently, I mean in the last ten years or so, you've seen a lot more of that, But before that there was a lot of emphasis on this smooth motion. Now, I should mention the steadicam existed long before Baron Munchausen came out. Gilliam chose the Dolly option to create a particular visual effect that would have been very hard to do even

with the steadicam, so it was done purposefully. And a steadicam rig typically has a mechanical arm attached to a harness worn by the camera operator, and it uses some cool mechanical elements to smooth out motions. And like I said, I did a full episode about this, so I'm not going to go into all the mechanics right here, but there's some really fantastic long stead camp shots in cinema that show off what this kind of rig can achieve.

One example, a famous one, probably the one that most people site when they're talking about long steadicam shots, is a scene in Good Fellas in which the character Henry Hill takes his future wife Karen on a day to the nightclub, and they passed through the kitchen on their way to get through to a table, and it's a

very long scene. Lots of action is going on as the cameras moving through following these characters, and it would have been impossible without the use of a steadicam unless you were just going to deal with a very shaky kind of experience, which would have taken away from the effect.

Then there are the first and second camera assistant roles. Now, these are people who helped the camera operator in very ways, such as measuring and pulling focus during a shot, threatening film into a camera if it's an actual film camera, or monitoring data in the case where you're using a digital video camera rather than an actual film camera. On some sets, there's what is called a data wrangler. It's a relatively new position because in the old days it

was all done on film. But data wranglers oversee the function organizing, labeling, duplicating and formatting of hard drives to make sure captured footage gets to where it needs to be and that they're always more storage available for for the camera operators to save footage. Two, the second assistant camera operator or a cameraman is often the term used. Tends to be in charge of loading and unloading film

for film cameras. They're often also referred to as the loader as a result, and they're also usually the person who is the slate or clapper and that or they oversee that task. Maybe they're not doing themselves, but they're ultimately in charge of making sure it gets done. So let me take a quick aside to talk about this. The slate is that clapboard you've probably seen in either behind the scenes footage or in television shows or films that show the production side of some sort of movie

or TV show. Uh, this is the little board. It's it's white and black. Typically it's got a little uh lever that goes up and can slam down and make a clapping noise. It's got stuff written on it now typically the clapper slate or clapper board, or there's dozens of names for this thing has the information on it about the scene and take that's being shot at that time.

A take is another attempt at filming a scene, and some directors like to do lots of takes so that either they get exactly what they want or they have a lot of different options to pick from once they get to the editing phase of film's production. Some directors are pretty quick to move on as soon as they figure they got more or less what they need, so they'll only do a few takes unless something really messes up,

and then they'll do another one. So the board typically has whatever the scene number is and then the take number on it um and probably some other information on there too. It might have the associated film role on there if the film is actually shot on film, probably has the date, probably has the name of the director and the director of photography, and maybe some other information

as well. Now, the purpose of this, the reason why we have clapboards in the first place, is one to help editors synchronize audio with the visuals and to be able to just associate the audio that's been captured with the visuals that were captured. So whomever is running the clapboard will actually say the scene number and take number, maybe a little more information such as which can is being used before clapping that little movable arm down on

the board. They say that so that the audio version once once we know that sound is rolling, has a record of that take, and the film, which we also know is rolling, also has a record of it, and then you can sink the two up the clapping motion is the que that editors used to synchronize the video or film with the sound. You see the lever come down, you know that that should be associated with the loud

clap noise on the audio track. You make sure those two line up, and then you've got your audio synchronized with your visuals. Without that, you would have a really hard time making sure the two were in line, and everything would seem a bit off. You know, people's mouths would be moving, but the sound they would make would not be in line with their talking, and that would be very off putting. All right, Now back to the camera crew. There are people who work closely with the

camera crew called grips. They also work closely with the lighting and electrical crews. Now, they themselves are not electricians. So what do the grips do and what is a key grip? Well, first, let's talk about where the name comes from. Generally speaking, most people think that the name comes from the stage theater world, but this time we're talking about the American stage, not the English stage. And in American theater it was shorthand for the stage hands

who would help move scenery during a show. So between scenes, maybe the curtain comes down, or maybe there's a scrim or something that's hiding the upstage from everybody. The grips come in, they grip the scenery, and they haul it off to wherever it needs to go. Now in the film world, they do a little bit more than just

lug stuff around. The grips are responsible for acquiring, building, maintaining, setting up, and breaking down all the equipment that supports the cameras, and that includes stuff like tripod dollies, cranes, jibs, the dolly tracks, and other rigs. They might have to build rigs that can hang from supports or be mounted to a vehicle, or otherwise help support a camera if

there isn't a market solution out there already. In the case of dollies, they are also the people who push the dolly along the track as the camera operator captures a shot, at least if you're not using a motorized dolly. They also work with lighting crews to hang lights and set up lighting rigs, though the actual electricians on the lighting crew work with the lighting itself, so again the grips don't end up working the electrical side of it. They work on the physical. Let's get this to where

it needs to be. The key grip is the head grip in charge, sort of the the foreman or supervisor of the department, and frequently will end up working with the main camera in a film production, so the key grip and the gaffer worked together closely to make sure the lighting and the camera support are all in lace. Now, both the key grip and the gaffer can have a position under them called the best boy, and this is where a lot of mystery comes back into play. The

best boy position isn't really just an assistant. Typically, the best boy is responsible for doing stuff like hiring the crew in their respective department, whether that's in the grips or in the electrical and lighting department. They schedule the crew, they coordinate between departments. They might oversee you equipment rentals. They can oversee the day to day operations of those departments. So they are the supervisors under the foreman. So where

the heck did the term best boy come from? Well, one popular but probably apocryphal explanation is that comes from the early days of film production, before all the roles on set had been established and unionized. So but back in those days, you had a lot more lucy goosey collaboration between the lighting crew and the grip crew, and in those days goes the story you would have the key grip or the gaffer asking one another to lend someone from the other team to help out on their team.

So the gaffer might go to the key grip and say, I need somebody to help us out. Send over your best boy. So in other words, send over whomever's on your team who's really good at what they do, because I need someone who's going to pick up what I need them to do very very quickly, and we got

to get this done. And that was generally placed as this is the origin of the term, and that eventually the term began to be used for the supervisor of the grip or electrical teams, the idea being that whomever is doing the best job is going to get promoted

to supervisors, so they're the best boy. Now, the term is likely apocryphal, or the very least, there's no real source to support it apart from hey, you know, that sounds like it makes sense, So it's kind of like after the fact reasoning saying, well, it's probably because of this, but there's no documentation to show that that's actually how it happened. And there is an alternate theory, one that also doesn't have a ton of documentation to support it,

and it's that the term comes from sailors. And this requires me to talk for a second about the relationship between sailing and film. So the general wisdom goes that back in the old days, theaters, as in stage theaters,

would frequently employ sailors who were between jobs. So the sailors would be looking for work while they're on land and they don't have another UH expedition or whatever, they don't have another job lined up, they get hired on to do work in theaters, working in the rigging, so they're rigging up scenery pulleys and UH curtains and that

sort of stuff. And it was similar to the work done on sailing vessels with sales and and ships rigging, So the sailors would do this stuff and move scenery around. And this is, by the way, the also the UH the possibly apocryphal reason why there's a superstition in theater that it's considered to be bad luck to whistle if you are backstage at a stage theater, and the reason for that is that the sailors would, as the story goes,

use whistles. They would whistle to one another to signal wind, to move scenery, or otherwise mess with the rigging backstage. So if you were backstage and you were whistling, you might accidentally command the sailors to do all sorts of funky and possibly dangerous stuff with the scenery. Now, I have no idea if that's actually true, because the theater world is even worse at documenting its mythology and terminology than the film world is, and of course many film

terms would grow from the theatrical world. But anyway, according to this alternate theory, in the whaling industry, it was apparently common to refer to a member of the crew as the best boy. Beyond this fairly vague description, I can't find much more, and there's not really any evidence to support the assertion, apart from the fact that sailors occasionally worked in the ors, and that possibly the term made its way from the sailing industry into the theatrical

industry and then onto the film industry. Whatever the case, the best boy positions are important, and while the name indicates a gender, a best boy can be anyone, whether they identify as male, female, or other. And I've got a few more positions to talk about and some other terminology to get through. But first let's take another quick break. So we've got a few other big departments to talk about, like the sound department. This includes people like the sound mixer,

the boom operator, and the sound utility expert. Their jobs, as you would guess, is to capture sound during recording and organizing all those recordings so that they can be mixed later in the editing process. They also typically try to capture important sounds and eliminate distracting stuff like background noise and room tone. Sometimes that's done at the time of recording. Often it's done in the editing phase. And

related to this group are python wranglers. That's a term jokingly used to describe people whose job it is to help manage the cables on a film set so they're not in the way. They also work obviously with the electrical and camera departments, so you've got people who are just making sure that stuff is is kept fairly organized so that it doesn't cause a problem and doesn't end up making a big mess, so that when you're striking at the end of a day or at the end

of a shoot. Uh, it doesn't, you know, take up even more time. Now, while I'm talking about sound, I should also mention a d R, which stands for additional dialogue recording or additional dialogue replacement. I've also seen some sources say a d R stands for automatic dialogue replacement, But additional is how I normally see it. And honestly, uh,

the practice has been around longer than automated systems. But this is a technique in which an actor rerecords lines of dialogue in a studio in order to get a clean audio version of the line. The actor times their delivery to work with the captured footage, because obviously you can't just create new footage, not without the use of computers anyway. And so it's sort of like lip syncing,

but in reverse. Instead of instead of mouving words that have already been recorded, you're recording new words, but you're doing it to time it with previously recorded visuals. So the actor has to time their delivery to work within that captured footage. And this can be done to correct for poor audio recording from the onset or on location audio. Let's say there was some extraneous noise that was too distracting.

You could re record the audio in studio and have it inserted there, Or it could even be done in an attempt to change the performance that the actor gave by having the actor give a different read on the lines, maybe a different emotional take or a different emphasis on certain words. And and it's done well. The audience never

even notices it. They don't notice the difference between something that was recorded on set versus a d R. If it's not done well, it could be super distracting, like it might not quite match up with the mouth and it seems really weird. Uh. Then you have the art department. This falls under the command of the film's production designer, who helps determine the look of a film outside of

the camera and lighting departments. So those departments are all focused pun intended on how to light and capture a scene. But the production designer is in charge of the groups that make all the stuff that goes into those scenes. Like they select locations for location shoots, they build sets, uh, they dress sets, they design costumes. They set the physical look for the characters with makeup or prosthetics. Visual effects teams are part of this too. So under the production

designer you have a lot of other people. Uh. The art director is in charge of craftspeople who work in set design and graphics. They also head up the illustrators who might work on a film. They're really important through the entire phase, including pre production. Uh. They might help with designing animatics and storyboards. That helps the director bring

a vision into realization before committing stuff to film. So you could say, like, I'm thinking of having the camera in this particular position, and this is how I'm imagining the the scene playing out. You can have an artist kind of draw out what they feel that the director is saying and sort of build out a comic book or even crude cartoon version of whatever the action is going to be. It can also be a really collaborative process with the director of photography to really figure out

exactly how it's supposed to look. That also gives the director of photography and a chance to rethink their position. They might say, you know, now that i'm thinking about it, I think that actually putting the camera over here would look better. Let's see what that might look like and have the illustra to go back and change things out. It's time consuming, but it's less expensive than finding out once you're there on set and you've set everything up.

The set designer is the person who is in charge of overseeing the entire set construction job, from concept to full build out. UH. This often happens in a sound stage, which is a controlled environment within which a film can shoot, so you're isolated from the outside world you have fewer

distractions that can come in. But set designers also can build sets on locations where you have slightly less control, but you can have more authenticity In those cases, the set decorator's job is to furnish the set with all the important props and elements that make it seem like

a real place. So a set decorator working on a film UH that takes place and say an old, creepy mansion, might use a collection of objects that could be in a warehouse that the movie studio owns, or it could be rented from a business that's specifically caters to the movie industry. Or they might even crawl through various antiques and oddit these shops in order to find what they're

looking for. If you listen to my episode with the Stranger Things crew, you heard them talk about the challenges of filling a set with appropriate props and set pieces that dated from the nineteen eighties. Now, while the set decorator determines which pieces are going to go in, there's a crew called set dressers who are actually in charge of placing those items within a set according to the

vision of the creative team. Now, as you can imagine these films, sets can have hundreds of props in them, which means someone needs to keep track of everything, and that job falls to the props master. A prop is really anything that isn't an actor, a piece of scenery, uh, some film equipment, or a costume. It's pretty much everything else. They tend to be portable or at the very least movable. Uh. Some people will actually only use the word prop to

mean anything that an actor actually interacts with within the film. So, in other words, if there's a book that an actor has to pick up and and look through, that book would be a prop. But maybe there's a stack of books that are on the set that the actor never touches. There, just set dressing, And they would argue, no, that's not

a prop, that's scenery. But it's all largely academic. The props master has to keep track of all these things, and so typically has an organization system to know where props are in order to get hands on them when

they are needed for any given scene. Often they are also prop builders on staff as well, as that name suggests, they build any props that you can't otherwise find, So in some types of films, like science fiction or fantasy, you have a lot of props that you really just can't find in stores, so you have to make them from scratch, like Star Wars with lightsabers. Lightsabers, I hate to tell you, aren't a real thing, so they had

to build them. Likewise, costumers can end up making outfits for cast that are a combination of pre made pieces, some of them bought right off the rack from stores or off and secondhand shops. Other stuff might be made to order for the film itself, unique pieces that were specifically made for the movie. In addition to those positions, you have special effects artists who may work on practical effects, meaning those effects that happened within the real space and

use physical objects or c g I effects. In the case of c g I, most of that work tends to happen far from the action of the actual shooting location, and it can stretch well into the post production phase of a film. Practical effects are pretty nifty, but they also can be fairly expensive, and if things do not go well, they can end up pushing a film behind schedule. A famous example of this would be the mechanical shark in Jaws. I did a full episode about that shark

with Chris Palette years and years ago. The shark's name is Bruce. Anyway, that ended up being a huge headache. But practical effects, when they're done well, can seem more quote unquote real than c g I effects, and some film snobs like myself tend to favor practical effects over c g I in most cases because if c g I isn't done well, it just looks kind of like a video game to me. Now, you've also got makeup

artists who have a pretty challenging job. Even with a simple film that has no need for special effects makeup, those artists have to make sure an actor's look is consistent throughout the film, depending upon whatever the film scene calls for, So they have to keep a record of all the different looks that the actor goes through in the course of a film to make sure that they stay the same from scene to scene, and if you're shooting scenes that are sequentially far apart in the in

the finished film, it may be that the actor has to undergo some sort of transformation, and it means that you might have to have a record of several different looks to make sure you replicate exactly the right one for whatever scene is shooting that day. If the film calls for special effects makeup, there's an even bigger job ahead of the crew because they may have to work on a single actor for several hours to get everything ready for the camera. There are also location scouts and

location managers. Their job is to seek out the real world locations where a film can shoot. I've had a lot of location scouts come through my neighborhood um and location managers talking with me as well about using the area for for shooting, and they have to handle all the real world issues that come along with that, including possibly working out deals with homeowners so that they can use a location for for a shoot, and that ends

up getting to be a really complicated job. You've gotta be a real people person to be a good location manager. But there are tons of other roles as well. If a film requires stunts, there's a stunts department. That's the group to make sure that any potentially dangerous action on camera is done safely and with trained professionals to minimize risk to the performers, to the crew, to the equipment,

to the production. There's the craft's Services group. Some people argue that's the most important group on any film set it because they feed everybody, They bring all the food. Uh. Then there's the transportation captain who has to handle all the logistics of getting everybody and everything to where it

needs to go. So they need to make sure that all the talent has their transportation to get to the location, that all the crew is knows where they need to be and how they're going to get there, that all the equipment is ready to be shipped there, and there are there are trucks to do it. Um. I can't

even imagine the stress that goes with that job. Also, they tend to be the first great people on location and the last people leave, and they have to be because they're in charge of getting everybody to where they need to go. In post production, there are also lots of other jobs they're folly artists. That's the sound effects group. There are there's marketing, there's publicity, there's accounting, there's casting. A lot of that is pretty self explanatory. I do

want to end this episode talking about editors. The editor's job is to take all the footage, all the aftured sound, all the A d R, all the effects reels, all that stuff and make a movie out of it. Now, movies are made in editing. The editor can have just as much impact, or potentially even more impact than a director on the final feel of a film. The editor's job is to piece that film together and to select takes from all those shoot days and to put them

in the proper sequence to tell the story. And they have to do that also by adding in the correct sound and all that other stuff. So it said that a great editor can turn a decent film into a fantastic film, and they can turn a fantastic film into a masterpiece. A bad editor can take something that you know has good raw material and turn it into a

total mess that's almost unwatchable. Some directors work very closely with editors to craft a final piece that best represents what the director had in mind, and so they take a very tight hand with it through the whole process. Quentin Tarantino is famous for this. Some times producers will step in the way and they'll prevent a director from having too much influence on the final edit of a film.

The producer might say, you know what, your creative vision, it's not so good, so I'm not gonna let you do that because it's gonna cost me money, and then they make the editor do all the work. Sometimes the producers are the ones steering the editors. They can get really messy. There are tons of stories in Hollywood about how these stories play out, and most of them are ugly. Now, I think, out of all the positions on a film production, I respect the editor most of all because they cannot

create a new scene or anything like that. They can't make something out of nothing, but they can take what was shot and shape it, so that has a really powerful effect on an audience. Sometimes just cutting a scene short can do the trick. Or switching between different takes to get the best reactions from the various actors in the scene will do the trick. And I don't want to go overboard on praising editors because obviously everyone on

a film set is important. They all contribute to the success of a film, but really the editor helps take all that stuff and create a final picture. And that is the rundown on the basic rolls behind the scenes on film productions. Like I said, I plan to go into the the various sayings in terms used on film sets to describe the process of making films in a future episode. Um, after a couple more episodes, but for now,

let's say it's a rap now. If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, you can write me an email. The address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can pop on over to our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. There you are going to find the archive of all of our older episodes, links to our social media accounts, as well as a link to our online store. And I will talk to you again really soon. Tex Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works.

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