The Beginner’s Guide to Film-Making: An Introduction

If you’re reading this, I’m sure you’ve seen a film before. From the great epics such as Gone with the Wind to much smaller pieces, like the commercials we see on TV every day, film is a medium that is all around us. Since its creation in the end of the nineteenth century, film has come a very long way in terms of artistic and technological advances. The first motion picture to be filmed was only sixteen frames long and was commissioned to find out whether all four of a horse’s hooves were off the ground at once while galloping. Few films were made in the early days since the equipment to create them with was hard to come by and expensive to afford.

In this day and age, however, film is an accessible medium for anyone due to the fact that cameras are easier to acquire and are much cheaper. Most people have at least one type of camera in their possession, like cheap consumer ones or cellphones with built in cameras. On that note, cellphone films have become so prevalent that entire film contests have been dedicated to original pieces made using the common piece of technology. Why, you could be making a film right now, right?

Well, before we get ahead of ourselves, film-making is actually a much more complex art than it seems. Think of your favorite film for example. I’m going to use one of my favorites for this, a British film that won seven Oscars; The King’s Speech.

If you’ve checked the cast and crew section of your favorite film’s IMDB page, you’ll notice a long list of names with people that have job titles such as grip or assistant director. On The King’s Speech's IMDB page you can find somewhere around four hundred different names listed with different job titles. That’s about four hundred people working on a single film, isn’t that amazing?

On a film set, even the slightest job, such as driving an actor or moving a light is important. All of those jobs are divided into departments such as the Art, Sound, Post, Camera, etc. Basically, a department in a film crew is a grouping of jobs that are related to each other. For example, a hair dresser and a makeup artist would be in the same department. A makeup artist and a camera operator would be in different departments; the Hair and Makeup and Camera departments respectively.

I’m going to go in-depth with each of these departments and the types of jobs as well as notable people within them throughout this series of articles. In the next article I’ll be talking about a subject close to Mibbians: writers! Also, I will be talking about the parts of a script and how it is written!