ABSTRACT
“Production,” loosely speaking, might refer equally to the acts of imagining, shooting, and editing a one-minute film school project. That process of production understood in broad terms, moreover, generally shakes out into three, whatever the context: pre-production, production, and post-production. This chapter explains who does what in each of these, where we might learn to do various tasks, what it takes to make a 16 mm film or digital film, and how film production is organized technically and economically. It introduces the reader to some of the many issues tackled by film studies scholars who focus on production. The chapter takes three examples to illustrate how scholars generate and treat the problematics that emerge from production. It looks at cinema practices marginalized by academia such as gay porn and other “body genres”; analyses of genre and ways of thinking beyond genre, and the ways in which distribution can function as authorship.
