Film Fests and Script Supervising

The last week has been a bit of a whirlwind, but well worth it.

For starters, I did get my submission off to the Williamsburg Film Festival in time… fingers crossed, they post their film lineup in August.

I’m going to keep on with submissions, and my next stop is the Stony Brook Film Festival… this one’s actually free to submit to, so there’s no reason not to give it a shot. It’s due by May 1^st, so I plan on shipping out my entry by tomorrow.

Submitting to Williamsburg was $30, which I’m not including in my tally of how much I’m spending vs. what I would have spent for an MFA since, well… that $100k MFA wouldn’t have covered the cost of submitting to film festivals anyway!

In further news, I wound up taking the DFA’s two-day Script Supervisor course as my free class for having won the Director’s Choice Award. All I can say is that script supervising might be the hardest job in the filmmaking industry (an industry in which each job I’m exposed to seems harder than the last!)

Basically, the script supervisor is responsible for continuity in the film. You’ve probably all seen movies where one moment something’s there and the next it’s not, and you realize it’s a mistake? For instance, we watched a clip from Devil Wears Prada, and noticed that during the scene where Andy has dinner with her father, he actually takes his glasses off three times – in a row. They keep magically appearing back on his face. A script supervisor should prevent this from happening.

Sounds simple, right? Wrong. A script supervisor needs to literally be able to watch a scene with any number of people and report on every detail of that scene, while doing five other things simultaneously and giving instructions to all other departments on how to keep things consistent in terms of lighting, clothing, makeup, you name it.

We were given an exercise in which three people were passing around drinks and cigarettes in a scene – and, as there’s only ever one script supervisor on a film, that means one pair of eyes needing to note exactly when each of those characters sips, puffs, passes, and exactly how they’re holding themselves while they do it. Meanwhile, the script supervisor’s also lining the script according to who the camera is facing, timing the scene, and filling out reports on each take.

If you’re not getting a sense of how impossible a job this is, I suggest trying it by having some friends read a one page scene, just once, while you do the above. See how much you catch. (Was her coffee cup facing forward or back? How far down was the cigarette burned? What word did he lift his arm on? Did she step into her jeans with her right foot or her left?)

I have a new-found respect for script supervisors, and for our amazing teacher, who is actually the head of the board of script supervisors here in NYC. I seemed to have a knack for it, so she said she’s keeping me in mind for the future… although, truthfully, it’s a career that might just be too difficult to pursue!

If you’ve ever considered it, though, know that script supervisors make good money – over $1,000 a day.

And one final note on this: even without any plans to become a script supervisor, this course is valuable. Particularly for directors and actors, who might not give any thought to how things need to be done the same way, take for take, so that it doesn’t wind up being a mess when edited together. Having taken this course, I have new skills to take to my next shoot.