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I’ m constantly working with various crews, artist, and talent. Were you trying to get it done for the festival or was there another constraint in there?
Well the cinematographer and talent, we were trying to work around their dates. The director was also an actor and he was working so hard at that time. He was in multiple shows and traveling all over the state.
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How many movies have you produced so far?
I have not counted. I think my first film I produced in April 2004. Then I produced my German Filmmaker’ s movie, which was a thesis film at the University of New Orleans and it’ s called“ Us Against the World”. We produced that one and it won Best Picture and Best Screenplay at the UNO Film Festival and Best Sound at the New Orleans Film Festival. And we just released it on DVD.
How does that work, distributing a short film?
I’ m in the process of signing a contract with an online platform, which puts a package of short films into an app, and people download it so people can watch a block of shorts.
Besides everything, what does a producer do, or what do you feel your role is?
The producer is there from the very beginning to the very end. We don’ t do quite everything of course, we hire different people to do different jobs, but we do oversee and supervise every single department and every step. For me it starts with an idea, if the script is not there yet we rewrite the script, we perfect it so it’ s ready to go to be shot. After that we hire a team. If the director is the same person that wrote the script it’ s easier but sometimes you have to hire a director and sometimes he brings his own team. So we put all the crew together, we do casting, sometimes we hire a professional casting director or sometimes we do a local casting depends on the scope of the film. We scout locations, lock locations, usually I work with SAG agreement films so that’ s another process that I have to do. I obtain signatories and make sure all the paperwork is there. Then we start production, for short films it’ s about 3 or 4 days with a few pick up days of shooting. For a feature it depends on the budget. Then postproduction, it’ s editing, it’ s supervising, then submitting to festivals, finding distribution.
So your job isn’ t done once shooting starts or even finishes? Oh no, you still have to be there to make sure everything goes smoothly.
What challenges did you experience, if any, being a woman as a producer?
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