The key roles in filmmaking
During the filming of The Deer Hunter, 1978. Photograph: The Ronald Grant Archive
DOP: Vilmos Zsigmond
Exploring the intricate world of film roles reveals a hierarchical and structured system, mirroring the organizational dynamics found in many corporations. While this structure comes with its own set of advantages, such as streamlining processes across productions and facilitating global shoots with diverse international crews, it also reflects the challenges inherent in such systems.
Here's a glance at the key roles, presented in alphabetical order, each playing a crucial part in the cinematic tapestry: Acting, Animation, Casting, Cinematography, Costume design, Directing, Editing, Executives, Makeup & Hairstylist, Marketing & Public relations, Music, Producing, Production Design, Screenwriting, Sound.
Let’s go through them.
Acting
A movie actor is a performance artist who uses movement, gesture, and intonation to realize a character in motion pictures. They bring characters to life by interpreting the words of a screenplay and working with the guidance of a director. An actor inhabits a role by drawing on a broad range of skills, including understanding a character's background and history, conveying emotional depth, employing physical traits, and utilizing dialects and accents. An actor strives to portray a character as honestly and authentically as possible to make the story on screen believable.
Animation
Animation is often described as frame-by-frame moviemaking because the illusion of movement is generated by displaying individually created images in rapid succession. Those images can be drawings or paintings (traditional animation), articulated physical objects (stop-motion animation), or computer-generated images (digital animation). An animator is not bound by the laws of physics, and their work makes flat drawings and pixel displays seem alive and real. Animation existed before cinema itself and has endured due to the timeless appeal of worlds and characters entirely created by artists.
Casting
A casting director brings their extensive knowledge of actors, along with a deep understanding of each character in a screenplay, to a conversation with moviemakers about the way certain actors can bring a movie's story most vividly to the screen. Informed by auditions and screen tests, they collaborate with directors and producers during preproduction to help bring the movie's acting ensemble together, role by role.
Cinematography
A cinematographer, also known as a director of photography (DOP), is an artist whose canvas is the screen. They are responsible for visualizing and making artistic and technical decisions that bring the director's cinematic vision to life. The cinematographer oversees the camera, grip, and electric departments to execute a movie's visual elements. These include lighting, framing, composition, camera motion, camera angles, film stock and camera selection, lens choices, depth of field, color, exposure, and filtration. The cinematographer closely collaborates with the director, production designer, costume designer, visual effects supervisor, and makeup artists to conceptualize and realize the movie's visual style and the meaning of its imagery.
Costume design
Costumes are so much more than clothes—they embody the psychological, social, and emotional condition of the character. A costume designer has both a narrative and a visual mandate. Designers serve the story by creating authentic characters and by using color, texture, and silhouette to provide balance within the composition of the frame. No matter the era or genre, everything about a movie's characters must ring true because the audience is asked to believe they are real. Cinematic icons are born when a character and a movie capture the public's imagination.
Directing
A motion picture director carries the creative responsibility for a movie, overseeing the artistic and technical elements of the production and creating a coherent and compelling vision for its style and tone. The director interprets the script, hires key cast and crew, plans sets and locations, supports and guides the actors to get memorable performances, supervises editing and music, and adheres to the production budget and schedule. With strong technical knowledge, a director fosters a sense of creative collaboration to ensure that everyone is working toward a shared concept for the movie.
Editing
A movie's editor plays an important creative role in the moviemaking process. The editor works with raw footage to combine shots into sequences that, when linked together, create a motion picture. Traditionally, editors used scissors and tape when manipulating thousands of feet of film stock. Today, they tend to work digitally, utilizing computers and editing software. Editors creatively weave image, story, dialogue, music, and performance into a layered composition to produce an engaging whole.
Executives
Movie executives oversee, approve, and facilitate the production and distribution of motion pictures through a variety of creative, business, financial, and strategic decisions. They decide which movies are made and work closely with directors and producers on developing scripts. They manage the financing, production, marketing, and publicity processes, set the release dates, and choose the methods by which movies are available for viewing. Usually dealing with several projects at once and always with an eye on the bottom line, executives may work for studios, production companies, streaming services, or distribution companies.
Makeup & Hairstylist
Makeup artists and hairstylists play a vital role in the development of the look of a character. Collaborating with actors and directors, they help to communicate a character's lifestyle, socioeconomic status, and personality. Makeup artists and hairstylists begin their process by reviewing a movie's script, examining the characters, and conducting extensive research on the movie's period, location, and tone. Their work ranges from enhancing an actor's natural appearance to completely transforming them with beauty techniques, prosthetics, and creative hairstyling and wigs. They develop convincing characters in support of a movie's vision and narrative.
Marketing & Public relations
Marketing and public relations professionals work to generate public awareness around a movie. Elements of this complex part of a movie's life include developing a holistic marketing and creative strategy that may include posters, billboards, trailers, social media placements, and exclusive online content. In addition, a concurrent press, media, and publicity strategy is developed that may include press interviews, screenings at relevant festivals, red carpet premieres, special events, and appearances by stars on talk shows. Without the marketing and public relations teams, even the most highly acclaimed movies may never find the right audience.
Music
Movie music, also known as a score, is created by composers to accompany and enhance a motion picture. During the silent era, a pianist, organist, or small orchestra would often play music, sometimes a score specifically designed for the movie, during a screening. Today, a score is recorded and synced to the picture, moving with and against the image in ways that are determined by the composer and the director. Movie music is a cinematic dimension that evokes the time period and location in which the story is set, creates an emotional and psychological mood, and enhances the nuances of the story and characters playing out on screen.
Producing
A producer is an essential catalyst for every movie that gets made. From the inception of the project to the development of the script, through production and, ultimately, distribution and marketing, a producer works closely with the director and key collaborators to realize the best possible version of each project. Producers find stories from books, original screenplays, articles, and historical events to make into movies. They hire key cast and crew, secure financing through companies and individuals, supervise the day-to-day operations, and manage a movie's schedule, budget, and production timeline. Producers must stay focused on a wide variety of small details while keeping an eye on the big picture.
Production design
A production designer establishes the overall look and visual concept of a movie, working closely with the director to create environments and settings that convey time, place, and character in support of the script. They collaborate with a set decorator, who provides detail through furnishings, fixtures, and textural items that express the story and design aesthetic. In fact, the Academy Award for Production Design is given to both a production designer and a set decorator. Art directors, illustrators, graphic artists, and location managers also contribute significantly to the production design process.
Screenwriting
A screenwriter, unlike all others working in cinema, begins with a blank page. They craft the foundation for the entire motion picture and create the characters, story, and dialogue. They set the movie's tone and atmosphere and also describe its physical look. Their screenplay, or script, can be original, or it may be adapted from books, articles, or other works. As every motion picture starts with the word, it is the screenwriter who crafts a blueprint for the entire movie.
Sound
Soundtrack creation in motion pictures is a collaborative effort by different yet interrelated disciplines. Dialogue and natural sounds are captured at the time of principal photography by a production sound mixer. A sound designer/ sound editor prepares the recorded on-set dialogue and audio for mixing, adds new vocals recorded after filming (ADR, or automated dialogue replacement), and adds prerecorded and custom-made sound effects. Also, they create everyday sound effects, like footsteps and the movement of objects, which are recorded on a Foley stage. A rerecording mixer then shapes and blends these audio elements, plus the music, into a coherent and unified sonic tableau for the intended theatrical format.
Source: LACMA - Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
