Effective Project Cost Management in Film Production: Key Insights and Practices (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Project Cost Management is the process that is concerned with planning and controlling the budget of a project. This process is supervised by the line producer and includes activities such as planning, budgeting, estimating, financing, funding, managing, and monitoring costs to make sure that the project is finished within the scheduled budget. The production coordinator is often involved in supporting the line producer and is often the person who tracks expenses, collects receipts, and manages purchase orders. The production coordinator reports directly to the line producer. It's important to note that larger productions will have an entire accounting department, while smaller productions will just have costs managed by the line producer and production coordinator. This is actually what happened to me. I shot a film and produced a film back in 2016 up in Portland, Oregon, and while we had a fairly substantial budget, all of the tracking of costs went through myself. And the accountant who was on set and assigned to the project was involved in dispensing that in the form of checks. Smaller production cost management is so common that the reason the line producer is called the line producer is because they draft and manage the line items of the budget. This phase covers and tracks the project's total expenditure against the actual budget to make sure that the project is moving on track and within the fixed budget. And of course, logically, it makes sense for the line producer to manage that process since they are the ones who draft the budget. It's also worth noting that while most other project formats have a contingency amount built into the budget and it is visible on the budget, film and television doesn't have contingency baked in. Whenever a line producer is delivering a budget to a project sponsor or to a creative producer, the line producer has to hide the contingency in one of the other departments. And it varies so much that every producer has their own preferred method for where the line producer will hide things. I had one colleague who hid all of their extra budget in parking. I prefer multiple crumple zones so that if a certain area of the production gets cut dramatically, then I still have other pockets to pull from. But that is something to keep in mind when drafting and reviewing budgets for film and television. And it's become such an industry standard that actually studio executives acknowledge that when they are receiving a budget with no contingency line item, that they expect the line producer to have done their due diligence by hiding additional funds in certain areas or certain departments of the drafted budget. There are a handful of commonly used softwares for cost, budget, and resource management in the film industry, including Entertainment Partners, Movie Magic, Media Pulse, and Schedule. .