In the movie industry, you might seem all glitter in glory, but the reality is that a lot of work goes into making movies and your favorite form of entertainment. From grips to production assistants there are a lot of people working on studio sets every day and while their tasks are somewhat different the experience of working on a movie set is similar for everyone. If you’ve never set foot on a movie set on a studio lot you might be interested to find out what a day working at a movie studio looks like. Let’s jump into it and try to go through a typical day on a movie studio lot.
First and foremost, it’s important to understand that when you work on a movie set, you must be ready for your day. While many people think that actors and people who work in the movie industry have it easy, they can be very long and grueling days. This is why most people who work in the movie industry try to make sure that they get up early and work in the best of conditions considering that some of these can last from 10 to over 12 hours long. When you arrive how long your day is determined by what we call a call sheet. Because she tells everybody what their task is for today in when they should arrive.
So, when people first arrive on set the thing that they need to do is follow the call sheet for their task and usually, this task will be related to preparing for the very first shot that needs to be filmed for the date. This means that by the time the very first person arrives and the last person on the call sheet arrives everything needs to be done and ready for filming to begin. One thing that many people seem to underestimate is how much of the team effort making movies is. While the director is the lead, and the actors are very important nothing happens unless the boom mic operator is on set doing his job and the lighting crew is all set and ready for the scene.
Once everything is ready and set up to begin filming you will see that there is no time where someone isn’t busy. Even though a lot of people might not be doing anything while the cameras rolling everybody is still ready for the next task that comes after the take is chosen and selected as the good one. It’s important to realize that a lot of people who work on sets never do anything without asking since you never know what decision was made by which department. Once the camera turns off everybody on the team starts working towards setting up the next shot sometimes this means moving all the cameras around changing the lighting or simply completely moving from the studio to another set.
Depending on the scale of the movie you’re working on, or the studio budget certain films will benefit from having their own sets stay up all the time but other times you will have to move out things for the day as other teams might be filming at other times in the same location. This means that when it comes to packing up lighting and props for example there is a lot of back and forth between the actual set and the storage units present on the studio lot. Thankfully for many teams, it’s very easy to find what prop in what necessary equipment belongs to what set, thanks to proper inventory keeping and storage facility automation.
Depending on the length of the film and the availability of the actors and the director sometimes filming can go for a few months to almost a year. It’s important to keep in mind that a lot of the reason why the studio work is so scheduled and has so few breaks is because every second you spend on the studio lot costs money to the studio as well as the team making the movie. The faster you can wrap up a shoot the less money it costs to make and the easier it is for studios to make up the budget and eventually make actual profit on the final product.