Production Knowledge Base: Craft, Roles, Stills and Technique

Reference entries grouped by what they answer. Craft entries cover how work gets made, role entries define who does what on a unit, and the technical entries deal with formats, delivery and the tools in between.

71 entries sit behind those five headings. They are written for two readers at once: somebody commissioning work who needs to know what a stage produces before agreeing to a schedule, and somebody doing the work who needs the term used the way the industry uses it. Both end up asking the same questions in a different order, which is why an entry states the structural fact first and the practice around it second.

The grouping is by the kind of question an entry answers, not by the size of the project it came from. Craft entries follow the order of work, from the treatment that settles what is being made through to the review round that decides when it is finished. Role entries define authority: who is allowed to decide what, and where that authority stops. Photography entries treat stills as their own discipline rather than as a by-product of a film unit. Location entries deal with the permissions, the access and the conditions attached to a place. Technology entries cover formats, transcoding and delivery, where a decision made in an hour is often the one that costs a week.

A question that genuinely spans two groups is answered once and linked from the other. The cost of a shoot day, for example, belongs to the craft group as a scheduling question and to the location group as a permission question, and the two entries state different halves of it rather than repeating each other.

Inside an entry the shape is consistent. The term or the stage is defined first, in the wording the trade actually uses, because half of the disagreements on a production are two people using one word for two things. What follows is the part a reader can act on: what has to be settled before the stage begins, who has to be present for it, and what it costs the schedule when it is skipped or taken out of order. Lists within an entry are ordered by when the decision arrives, not by importance, so the sequence can be read as a plan.

No entry quotes a price, a day rate or a bonus figure. Rates move, vary by market and are set by bodies that publish them under their own names, so an undated number in a reference is wrong within a season and unverifiable from the moment it is written. Where a reader needs a figure, the entry names the class of public document that carries it — a union agreement, a municipal permit schedule, a published rate card, a platform specification — so the current value can be read at source. Structural facts stay: how many people a format needs on the floor, how many shoot days a scale of work implies, which permissions have to exist before a date is fixed.