The Big Picture
Filmmaking Lessons from a Life on the Set
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Film production veteran Tom Reilly has worked on the sets of critically praised films and commercial blockbusters for more than three decades?including seventeen years alongside director Woody Allen. In The Big Picture, he explores the art and the craft of filmmaking from the vantage point of someone actually running the movie set. Using examples unlike any of those in other books on film, Reilly exposes not only the power and the personalities, but the secrets of the pros. He shares the insights he gleaned while working with more than sixty Oscar-winning professionals?from Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Vanessa Redgrave to Sydney Pollack, Sven Nykvist, and Barbra Streisand.
In these fifty entertaining, illuminating short essays, Reilly invites you to join him on the film set. What is it like to shoot a love scene? How do you do a full body burn? What is it like to film in the Everglades or in a morgue? What is blocking or matching, and how long should a script be? How do you decide when to build a set? Why is the color palette so critical? Is night shooting worth the suffering?
The Big Picture delivers the surprising answers to these and other fascinating questions about what it takes to make a feature film, offering a glimpse into what it's like when the lights are bright, the camera is rolling, and the moviemakers are calling the shots.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After working on more than 40 films as an assistant director and associate producer, Reilly has written a valuable guide that film students and novice filmmakers will find illuminating and insightful. In 50 short essays Reilly analyzes the problems that often surface on movie sets, and offers solutions. He walks the reader through techniques he has observed over the years while working on films with Alfonso Cuar n, Sydney Pollack, Woody Allen and other top directors. The approach is not a routine rehashing of Hollywood anecdotes but a crash course covering specific situations and working methods: "Woody may not plan the day's shots until he is on the set on any given day, but he absolutely considers the abutting scenes and how they were, or will be, shot." Reilly opens with film set slang and jargon ("martini" = last shot of the day) and then moves on to cover everything from schedules, blocking actor movements, camera angles and master shots to variables in sunlight and the color palette: "Before you settle on that dress you think possibly might be raspberry pink, consider what color the walls will be painted on the set where the dress will be worn." Every page is packed with such practical tips and insider information, and Reilly caps off his fascinating facts and figures with a glossary of film terms. Minus padding or wasted words, this is a book that could well become a bible and standard reference text for aspiring filmmakers.
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