What was it like being on a set without an
>AD? Before I worked on my friend's shoot, I didn't know what
>an Assistant Director did btu I realized it's necessary to
>keep everything moving smoothly.

It wasn't so cool. The PM and I pretty much switched off on AD work since we know how essential it is to have one, yet the other producer (who swore up and down he would be Producer/AD) didn't really care to have one...especially because that would speed production up and he and the director had this odd idea that if a day was short (or shorter than 12 hours) that we obviously weren't doing a good job and getting good footage.

>
>Also, why did you attach yourself to a script you obviously
>thought was crappy? I assume you weren't too involved in the
>development.

I wasn't involved in script development whatsoever. The reason I attached myself was because at my school (a Cal State school...during a time where we're in a budget crisis) selects 4-5 projects to be made as senior films out of about 20 submitted scripts. In the mean time, people scramble to attach themselves to projects, because in your proposal, you must submit the people you have for major crew positions (DP(s), Producer(s), Editor(s), Sound, etc.). So I had my name on about 3-4 projects. Only ONE of those I was actually really interested in producing.

That project was submitted by the DP of this film. It was a slice of life type film about a girl with cancer. The guy who submitted it actually had cancer when he was about 17 or so and survived and has this work ethic that's just unreal...plus he's great at everything he does. He's the coolest guy I've met in film school, bar none. He actually turned down acceptance to MIT because his passion is film, and he wanted to go to film school. Anyway, he wrote this script and pitched it to the American Cancer Society, and they offered $2000 to donate to it. The script itself was rough...but he was offering myself a lot of input creatively to help improve it.

Anyway, that project didn't get selected, but he was DPing on this one (which was obviously selected) so I decided it'd be okay. Plus the director wasn't someone I was friends with, per se, but a decent guy who had made lots of films, so he was at least experienced. He didn't allow us to give notes on the script, nothing (I found this out in our 2nd post-being-accepted meeting)...so essentially, I didn't care about the script, but as I said...I felt at that point I'd already made my senior film with that NYU project (which I was involved in development from day 1), so this was merely for the grade.