To understand the process behind creating and filming episodic television, director Harry Winer had to see the “rhythm” behind it.

“What happens is that directors are hired on a week-to-week basis. You come in and direct one episode. You leave. Another director comes in and directs an episode.” Winer says. “For a television series that goes on for years, the actors themselves are the ones that are running the show because they know their characters.”

When Winer came into doing his first TV series, Hart to Hart, he had no idea how television worked, so he treated it as if he was making a movie: “I go in and start setting up these elaborate shots.”

“So I get called into Leonard Goldberg’s office [at 20th Century Fox], and I’m sort of intimidated,” Winer recalls. “And he says to me, thank you. You directed a beautiful movie, and maybe one day we’ll get a chance to actually make a movie together. But right now I’d like you to direct Hart to Hart.”

That was one of Winer’s biggest moments of education. “I had no idea what he was talking about,” Winer says, “but subsequently came to learn that in that era, episodic television was a product.”

There is a standardization of the product — of television — and there are certain rhythms and ways in which a series is filmed that is the emblematic style of that particular episode. And subsequently when I recognized that, I started playing ball and would make several more Hart to Harts.

After directing his seventh episode of Hart to Hart, Winer realized that it was indistinguishable from every other episode of Hart to Hart. “That was the goal that they had set for me to achieve.”

That led him to discover an important lesson in the TV industry. “I realized that in serious television, there was a choice of being a really good series television director and implementing the style that others had created versus sharpening my skills of original creativity that originating a television series would allow.”

In the late 1940s to 1950s, this thing called television invaded people’s homes, Alrick Brown comments. Film, on the other hand, went from this visual thing that eventually got sound. He says, “people were in their homes listening to radios and getting sound. Imagine what happened when a box came into your home, where an image was broadcast, and you could actually see pictures and people.”
Alrick thinks that television has evolved a lot. But he wants you to understand why TV was built as it tells you a lot about what television is today. At its core, TV was built to sell coffee, knives, vacuum cleaners, and whatever the American housewife needed in the 1950s. If they could just have commercials, that’s what TV would be, Alrick says.
They created television shows as sponsorships, as a part of selling these products. “And so this magical, wonderful thing that we call television, that we consume so much and shapes our understanding of the world, was created to sell products.”
Harry Winer thinks that television had a glorious introduction. Initially, it was film theater. In the 1950s, they were trying to figure out ways to capture an audience once they had this wonderful new tool.
They would take vaudeville comedians and other stand-up comedians and put them up for variety shows, Harry says. They tried to create legitimate storytelling. They would take plays that had been successful on Broadway, or that were part of the American theatrical canon, and stage them for TV.
Harry notes that this is where many directors of a previous generation to his own cut their teeth. For example, John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, and a host of others went on to become wonderful filmmakers. They took that understanding of the medium and found new ways of using imagery within a very tight budget and tight time frame in order to tell stories.
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In the 1950s and ‘60s, there were three television networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC. In the 1970s, Fox became the fourth network and changed the way in which the first three networks approached their business. There was more competition.

During that whole period of time—the 1960s to the 1970s– there was a certain kind of programmatic approach to content production. The networks saw what content worked and wanted to replicate it in everything they created. That was their product.

For example, they had a certain story to tell. They would cast a couple of stars and add a few particulars. They wanted to see the exact same story week after week, so audiences knew exactly what to expect when they tune in the next week.

Moving into the 1970s, content production fell under the auspices of the financial and syndication rule, where individual studios and individual producers were able to own their own product. There was an array of product that was available. But there wasn’t a tremendous amount of competition. Only certain buyers from the four networks were seeking out content.

In 1993, the financial and syndication rule was withdrawn. Networks were able to create and own their own product. Over the next few years, the networks started acquiring or creating production companies where they could then produce their own product. The networks understood that if they were producing the content, they would then not have to pay an independent producer for their creative efforts.

It was far more financially lucrative for the networks to be able to create their own production companies. They’d be able to keep the all money in the same loop, robbing the right pocket and putting it in the left pocket.

The film industry evolved significantly over the last century, from more theatrical presentations to more avant-garde Russian montages, to the advent of color, wide-screen, and now VR. The only way to move forward is to communicate thoughts or interpret those thoughts by looking to the past. From there, sometimes inspiration for something new comes.
Immersive VR Films – Emotional Journeys
Alfonso Gomez-Rejon describes an experience in which he felt like he saw something brand new. “Few years ago, I saw Carne y Arena,” Gomez-Rejon says, “which was Iñárritu’s VR short that was played at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. And for the first time in I don’t know how long, almost like you saw the future.” The highly immersive piece takes the viewer on an emotional journey far different from the movie and documentary experience. Immersive pieces like Carne y Arena and Edison’s Black Maria take viewers on a journey to feel what they’re feeling innovatively and emotionally.
For Gomez-Rejon, Carne y Asada was an eye-opener. The invigorating method of storytelling is a true testament to the future of the film industry.
Multi-Dimensional Storytelling
Many consider projecting movies as the purist way of expressing stories to the world. But then, there are also ways online or streaming where you could spider web into short films that explore other characters or subplots that didn’t make the final cut. As one can see, there are various ways to tell a story. It is this Mobius strip of infinite possibilities and shapes.
There’s something about staying current that is always humbling and invigorating instead of feeling that you’re stuck in the past. But hopefully, it makes you want to work a little harder and keep moving with it and the chance of expressing yourself and reaching more and more people.

“Casting a film is extremely important, as is casting the crew for a film,” explains David K. Irving. “The people you surround yourself with are the people that are going to help you make the film. So you’re only as good as the people that you surround yourself with.”
Casting a film has its good sides and its bad sides. The good sides are that if you have a good script, you’re going to attract a lot of wonderful actors. Actors love to act. They really want a good script. So finding a good script becomes your first job because that’s what will get you the best actors.
The downside is when you go through the casting process, you can really only cast people who’ve actually come into your office to audition for the film. So there are several ways you can get actors. One is, of course, if it’s a known actor. If you want Robert Duvall to be in your film, you don’t have to audition him. You know what he does. And you can cast him as a celebrity.
The audition process is a much more grueling process, where actors respond to an advertisement or to a casting call, or agents send them in for you to look at. You read these people. You give them sides, which is a piece of the script, and you try to understand in your gut, are these people going to work and be the best people for the film?
Once you start getting a sense of who your cast is, you’ll bring two cast members in together to see if there’s chemistry between those two people, which may indeed influence how you’re actually going to cast somebody in the role. One of the great taboos in our business is firing an actor on set. So you really want to make sure that the casting process goes well and that you feel very comfortable about the people that you’re putting in front of the lens.

 “One reason that I love costume design in film, television, theater, opera, et cetera, is the collaboration,” Explains Durinda Wood. “I love to collaborate with the other department heads, and that’s what the medium is all about. You’re not doing your own work in your own room like an artist. You’re collaborating with other people constantly.”

The script supervisor is really important for the costume designer because she or he is the person that breaks down the script and tells you how many script days there are. That’s really important for a costume designer because then you know how many changes there are for a character. We know what the time passage is. How many years pass? Things like that are very important for the logistics that have to go into your design.

“Then there’s costume department. That would be my costume supervisor. The costume supervisor is the second person in the hierarchy of the costume design department, and that person is all-important. The next would be hair and makeup. Hari and makeup in film are separate departments. There’s a hair department, there is a makeup department, and then there’s the costume department. Good communication with hair and makeup is so important,” Says Wood.

“Then there is the production designer, and within production design would be set decoration, and I would throw in locations, although they have their own department. Locations, production design, set decoration is so important to costume design because that’s the background to your costume. You don’t have a costume and an actor in your costume floating in space. It’s in front of something. You need to know what that wall or what that space is because sometimes you want the costume to fade into the background. Sometimes you want it to be incredibly showing away from the background.”

In film, it’s much harder than theater because in film, at the last minute, they often change what the background is. They’ll come to the set, and they’ll realize they don’t want to do it on that wall. They’re going to do it in that corner instead. Sometimes you have to go to the trailer and see if you have something else that will be better with that background. It’s a little bit instinct that you have to rely on when you’re a costume designer.

“I’m always on the set when a new costume comes up because there might have to be a change at the last minute. Finally, there is the director of photography. I want to know how it’s being shot. I want to know the lens. I want to know HD. I want to know video. I want to know if it’s film.”