Over the weekend I met with Mike Jennings, the Production Manager (UPM). For those of you that just don’t know - a UPM supervises the physical aspects of the production (not the creative aspects) including personnel, technology, budget, and scheduling. It is the production manager’s responsibility to make sure the filming stays on schedule and within its budget. We met to discuss the budget, scheduling, and crewing of the film. Over the next week Mike will work on organizing a crew for the shoot.

Mark your calanders because we set a tenative start date, note the word tenative, for June 19^th. There are several chips that need to fall into place for this date to stick but Mike and I felt it neccessary to set a date if he were to begin the process of crewing the film.

In addition to this Mike will be reworking the schedule. In a perfect world all of the actors would be available at the snap of my fingers, but unfortunatley I don’t live in that world. Matt Johnston, one of our lead actors, will shortly return to New York to begin filming the second season of his Discovery Channel series, It Takes a Thief. What this means is that we have to work with, and around Matt’s shooting schedule for ITaT. There are other actors involved with the project that will have the same issue - I only point out Matt’s schedule because it’s an easy example. So… Mike will do his best and working with the information available will create a shooting schedule. Once finished he will provide the cast and crew with what is called a day out of days, which is nothing more than a fancy way of saying shooting schedule. The day out of days tells you who, when, where, and what we will be shooting each day, for the duration of the shoot. Sounds complicated, right? It is. Just writing about it makes me happy that I no longer have to figure those aspects of the production out. Good luck Mike.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 22nd, 2006 at 8:14 am and is filed under Production. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.