The next part of the plan is to decide who is going to do what. If you are working in a group on your project you will probably want to share some of the tasks. You may want more than one person to have a go at editing, shooting, recording and directing or it may be that you take responsibility for a section of the production. It’s probably important that each person is involved in each stage of the production.
However, you should be able to start to think about all the jobs that will need to be done and to think about who will do them, even if you share the tasks for some of the time. Tasks in TV and radio are slightly different, so they have been split up. There are of course many other tasks in both radio and television. However, the ones listed here are the ones you are most likely to need and the ones you should think about allocating. In a professional production everyone involved will have specific tasks or jobs that they have to do. Very often they may be asked to do more than one job and combine two or more of the tasks I have outlined below. If necessary, you can print this checklist out from the website.
Template 5.1 TV and film tasks
Template 5.2 Radio tasks
You may not want to be prescriptive from the beginning about who does what. As you are likely to be working in a group you will probably want to take turns in doing some tasks, such as directing or editing. That’s great and it’s a fair way to do things, but you still need to decide who is going to do what and when. Why? In any recording or shoot there are lots of tasks which need organising. Cameras need to be charged, you need to make sure all your contributors know where they are going, you need to make sure everyone has a script, etc.
Each of you will need to take responsibility for organising some of the tasks. If you know which task you are doing in any particular part of the shoot/recording then you will know what you are responsible for organising. If you are camera or sound for the day then you know what you have to think about that day and you know what sorts of things you are going to have to organise. The big bonus of course is that you don’t have to think about anything else, just your task. If everyone knows what they have to organise then the whole thing becomes a lot easier.
As a group you may already know a lot about who wants to do what; if so, great: start to put names against some of the jobs. If you don’t yet know who wants to do what or you all want to do the same thing then that’s fine for the moment. You can allocate tasks differently for different shooting or recording days. For the moment just make a note of who wants to do what. If there are any blank tasks make sure that this isn’t a task you are going to need; you don’t always need costume and makeup, for example. But if you think this is a task you are going to need, then someone is going to have to be allocated to do it.
Allocating tasks to people is an important part of the production planning. If it’s properly done then everyone in the group should feel that they have an important part to play, and they will know what they have to do and when. In the end it will save you time and ensure that everything that needs to be done gets done.
