It is the ultimate, versatile production tool. There is little on a production set that it cannot hold, brace or help manipulate. The C-stand or Century Sta...

Production people in relatively large mid-western markets are quietly amused by all the talk about the “A-Level” crews found on the coasts, as if it were a ‘...

True story. A few years ago an out-of-town production company doing a “docudrama” in South City about a gang murder, hired a friend of ours for the crew. At...

I want that shallow depth of field look, OK?” Well, not so fast, hombre. While most people intuitively know the look of a shallow or narrow depth-of-field, c...

We were recently reading a great article from a blog called ‘Videothink’ entitled “The Competence to Recognize Incompetence in Film and Video.” We were struc...

More of our favorite, most obscure production and film biz terms. Some you may know while others are wonderfully oblique. Alan Smithee Film: Aka: Alan Smit...

Here are some of our favorite, more obscure production and film biz terms. If you know all of them, you’ve either been in the business a really long time or...

What is a LUT and, if I’m an agency producer, why should I care? Well, every business has its esoteric acronyms but this is a rather important one. While t...

It’s hard to pinpoint the causes for the trend of “sloppy” production. Maybe it is the relentless drive toward tighter and tighter budgets or shorter and sh...

In terms of getting the most bang-for-the-buck, there is seemingly one production tool more valuable than all others: Blackwrap. Blackwrap also called Cinef...

We are often asked how do we as directors successfully maximize the performances of on-camera talent. While there are mired techniques we have developed over...

What the hell is bitrate and bit depth and why should I care? From the 30,000-foot view, most of us creatives don’t need to know these specifics, but in the ...

The most dreaded question that all production companies and independent video producers face is: “How much is this going to cost?” It is always a confoundin...