Author: Ashleigh Nichols

It is the start to a new year. Another year has gone by and looking back, it feels like it went by in the blink of an eye. It’s weird how as you go through it, the days and weeks can feel long, but when you look back you may ask yourself, “How is it already January again?” I feel like I had one of those years. I feel like I had a productive, yet overextended year. It was a year filled with lots of creative projects happening, but they were squeezed into the little free time I had. Coming…

I believe it is important to always be working towards my goal of producing and directing my own projects (as well as being able to live off of those projects alone). I am not there yet, I have a day job, I work in production. I have worked for years on all kinds of things, from low budget films, to docu-series to Network television. During my freetime, I have kept myself busy working on all my side projects. I had also wanted to take classes but had not been able to fit them in my schedule…until recently. I have been…

When you are making a budget for any project of any size there are a lot of expenses or potential expenses to think about. Even the smallest of productions can have some major expenses. Some are fairly obvious, like paying the crew, renting a camera, paying for a location, etc. Then there are less obvious costs, like the ones that come after you wrap production. A lot of times, it is hard to think about any costs besides the ones you have to pay to just get through the filming portion of a project. It is important to think about…

A couple years ago, I was approached to Line Produce a low budget feature film in Mississippi.  I was so excited. I had been working in television for a few years now and missed working in the indie film world.  This also meant I was working with people I had never worked with before, in a state I had never worked in.  This was going to be an experience, and I was completely excited and slightly intimidated, not because the budget was so large, but rather because the budget did not leave a lot of room for any costly errors.…

LOCATION CONTRACTS: Location Contracts protect both the owner of the location as well as the filmmaker/production company. Your upcoming shoot depends on the location to be ready and open so you can film. It also depends on all the details you spoke to the property owner about. Let’s say you talked about being able to use the pool for your shoot, and you get there and the pool is drained… what are you going to do if your scene is about a child learning to swim in the same pool his great grandfather learned to swim in? What if you…

Sometimes, when you are just trying to shoot something and you have already begged all of your friends to come out and act for the day for free, the last thing you want to do is ask them to sign a contract. I mean, who wants to bother with contracts? We are just going to shoot this cool short film. We have a cool director who knows how to do all these cool editing effects and the writer has written a script that is so on point (plus we just want it to be a good time for everyone.) Contracts…

Recently, I was asked to make a budget for a Television show in the 3 to 3.5 million dollar range. I was excited to prove myself to show runners and a network for whom I had never worked. At the same time, I was scared beyond belief because I also had to prove myself to myself. I had never made a budget for a television show of this scale. I had worked as a Production Manager on shows of this size and I’d made many Indie Films, Web Series and Short Film budgets. I’d never dealt with this… 22 multi-cam…