Producing and 1st AD-ing Micro Budget Features with Tim Davis

Last week, we had the amazing opportunity of talking to Tim Davis from One County Film about producing and 1st AD-ing micro budget features. This was an amazing conversation and Tim did an awesome job at explaining his producing process. We agreed on the firsts steps filmmakers should take if they’re wanting to get into the feature film game and that is to just start.

In this blog, I wanted to give some of my thoughts about our conversation, but first, here’s the video.

Here are my recollected thoughts:

Hiring: It’s an overlooked process. Many of the problems that arose in our set came from one bad hire. It only takes one grumpy person to ruin a set, and if we would have been a bit more conscious or at little more cautious, the set could have had a more predictable outcome. Hire people you know can work well with others, and if you ever come upon an outside hire, make sure you go through a more conventional hiring process.

Think everyone else is more important than yourself: This one is an eye-opener when it comes to set management. The ideal candidate in a film set is not the one who will work the hardest because they think that they are the key to the film, but instead is a person who recognizes that the process is collaborative and needs others to perform better than yourself. So the next time you’re on set remember to rely on and help others to make the film shine.

Go down in budget, not up: Sometimes the best course of action is to go down in budget, not go up. This part of the conversation (starting at 35:55) is a game changer. The dream of any filmmaker is to be able to go up in budget after their first feature. Tim made the case of going down in budget, keeping the set controlled, and the story focused. Obviously, this is something One County did not do for Palace or Pompano Boy, but knowing that this is their plan for the future was really encouraging and eye-opening.

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