Working title notes

Working title notes

On the 28th of February as part of a media trip we visited working title films in london, during our visit we viewed a show real of films that were produced by working title as well as a brief talk, below are some notes from the talk.

During the talk we were introduced to 3 graduates named Charlotte, Tilly and Tristion who informed us about working titles Action Programme.

• The action programme is a salary paid internship which is open to anyone.
• Working title picks 3 people out of all their applicants, 1 person on development, 1 person on runner and another on production.
• The action programme is essentially a training programme which allows participants to learn how the industry works.
• Development
• All films are developed before release to a certain extent; its developments job to see the idea through to the end,i.e. does the script hold together, how well well will it work on screen.
• When a script is ready they send it of to the in house production team.
• Production
• Production execs work out the budget and logistics (actors who will star, where to film, which creative studios and directors to involve).
• Runner/AD
• AD works with production, their main goal is to see that the shoot goes as well as possible. One factor that is always in consideration is how expensive the shoot is going to be; there priory is to make sure that the shoot is as cheap as possible.
• The role involves a lot of communication and traveling.
• Tristion who's worked as an AD for many films mention that the more you see the more you learn about what works.
• Charlotte, Tilly and Tristion eventually gave some more insight into their internship and answered some of our questions

When asked about questions concerning marketing they informed us on how working title do not personally deal with marketing themselves, working title hires a marketing company called Freuds to do their marketing for them.

Other notes

• Working title produce 3-7 films a year, they tend to produce more films they believe will be blockbusters and use the money recieved from said films to produce smaller challenging.

 Sarah Jane Wright
We then received a talk from Sarah Jane Wright who is a production executive at working title, below are some notes taken from her talk.

•  According to Miss wright Anna karenina initially had a more realistic approach however it proved to be difficult to film in Russia due to expensive and other factors, instead director Joe Wright came up with the idea of setting the film on a theatre like stage after giving himself 48hrs to come up with a soloution.
• The film was then shot on the island of Kizhi,Karelia which proved to be much more cost effective.
• The location however caused some problems with filming since the temperature was -40 Celsius degrees cameras were freezing and cameramen were becoming ill.
• To determine the budget for the film they used a software called Movie magic scheduling which allowed them to determine the budget of scenes by imputing details such as how much dialogue in a scene and where the scene takes place and drawing up a strip board.
• According to Miss Wright the budget for a scene can cost up to 750- a million dollars a week.
• It can cost up to £3000 per shot as base price for visual effects. 

Amelia Granger 
Amelia Granger is the head of film development and gave us a talk touching upon the process of film development. 

• When developing an idea for a film film developers look for ideas with in books,magazine articles they've read or in writer/director meetings.
• Sometimes external writers appear at working title to pitch their new ideas for a film.
• From there if one is adapting a book or novel working title has to chase down the rights to the film, not only this but with any new film idea they need to see if there are companies producing a similar film.
• After that they begin to draft the script of the film which can take up to 10/12 times.
• Anna karenina was a short film to develop as it was out of print and in public domain.
• Orignally they wanted a much larger budget for the film however univsersal rejected the notion as quoted by Miss Granger "its no transformers" meaning it wont attract a mass audience as such a film since the film wont be understandable by everyone.
• When developing new ideas for the film playwright Tom Stoppard researched all the previous incarnations of Anna Karenina in films.
• Stoppard return with a draft of the script as well as a thesis centering around what the new film should comment on.
• Stoppard suggest that the film should be more focused around love, because of this many of the other politcal and agricultural themes were removed from the film.
• One concern they had when developing the film was location, they didnt want to us sets that have been used in previous Karenina films.