What to read after How to Produce Videos & Films?

This is the most up-to-date and complete book you will find on producing. It covers the new CUE process from BMI and ASCAP for getting paid for soundtrack music. It includes a buyer’s guide for covering Netflix Approved cameras. It covers the essentials and introduces you to the process. It can take a person who knows nothing about film & video production, leading them from story, to script, to budgeting, casting, finding actors, directors, camera people, composers, and distributors.

-It will also show you how to do ALL of that yourself, on almost any budget.

-You’ll learn about the gear you need like cameras, tripods, lighting, editing software, editing computer.

-Story & Script, the logline, a spec pitch that went to pilot, Joseph Campbell and the Hero's Journey, John Truby and the Anatomy of Story, the writing concepts of Syd Field, Christopher Vogler, Michael Hague, plus outlines, the screenplay, free and demo screenwriting software sources, adapting a book into a movie, music synchronization licenses.

-Finding actors and crew members. Free casting tools. Paid casting services.

-A look at cameras, including f/stop, t/stops, depth of field, focal lengths, distortions, filter, matte boxes, global and rolling shutters, and lens mounts.

-How to budget and plan a production economically.

-Business types for setting up your production company. How to protect your assets and a discussion of liabilities and taxes.

-Copyrights and licensing information.

-Making a storyboard and using it for shooting, editing, and composing.

-The shoot itself, framing shots, the master shot, the close shots, reverse angles, the 180 rule, lighting a set with sample diagrams, night for day shots, day for night shots, doing coverage of a scene, the role of the script supervisor.

-Special Effects, blue, green, and yellow screen, examples.

-Editing 16 and 35mm movie film, analog videotape using an edit controller, digital file types, editing software, the timeline, dialog editing, background, music, and room tone tracks.

-A primer for Composing Music, learning how to count to make chords and patterns, major chords, minor chords, sevenths, major sevenths, diminished, perfect seconds, including a template for a key wheel to help you change keys and know what notes makeup what chords. Concepts that the video person who is all thumbs can use to make their own basic backgrounds scores if they can’t find a composer.

-The new ASCAP and BMI Cue Sheets so you can get paid for any music when your productions air on broadcast or network television. Also covers the Harry Fox Agency for the licensing of your song, your music or to obtain permission to use someone else’s tunes.

-The history of imaging, optics, the photographic process, projectors, sound recording, tube electronics, television, audio recording, the how and why of film speeds, how color movie film works, how color television works, the differences between American and European film and video, the digital age, SD, HD, 4k and 8k. A look at the mystical color spaces of YUV and YIQ.

-Distribution concepts for your films.

-Los Angeles Union Scale Rates for the cast and crew so you can budget your scripts.

-A Bibliography of reference sources for further reading.

The author has been doing film, photography, and audio recording for fifty-five years working on productions that have aired on television, been screened theatrically and on YouTube. The author has been writing on the topics of film, video, and audio for magazine since 1980, including contributions for Mix Magazine, Music Connection, Pro Sound News, Technical Photography, Moving Image, etc.

The author was schooled in television electronics by engineers at Admiral in Chicago, and in film/theater production at Valley College in Los Angeles, under Dr. Milton Timmons, Dr. Stern, Peter Parkin MFA from Pasadena Playhouse, Elliot Bliss at CBS Television Studios (now Todd-AO).