More geeky metaphor
A Cambridge theatre production is very much like a computer, when you think about it. Hear me out…
The producer is the processor and micellaneous on-board devices, executing vast numbers of low-level instructions for higher-level purposes, communicating with all the other hardware components as and when necessary, and reminding everything of the time. The LD, SD, and other design roles are the PCI/AGP cards; they manage the output from the system as a whole, that the user (the audience) experiences. The TD is the dedicated graphics processor on the video card, while the LD is the rest of the video card. You generally need a LAN card, a publicist, as well, to communicate outsde the hardware box.
Because this computer powers up and down quite regularly, you need a hard drive for long-term storage. The Stage Manager records anything and everything, ready to provde the data again when called upon by another piece of hardware. The DSM is the device drivers; they talk directly to the PCI cards whilst power is on, telling them when to do things, and what things to do.
You then have to add a director, or an operating system, that uses the drivers and talks to all these bits of hardware and gives them meaningful higher-level tasks to do, as well as making sure the user/audience doesn’t see too much of what the hardware is doing. They provide a fundamental layer of abstraction so that the cast, the applications that the user actually interacts with, can get on with what they’re doing without worrying about the particular hardware implemented.
Most directors are OS X, of course (concerned with eye candy and making sure the user has a good experience) but you do get many flavours of Linux, just like real life: the hardware is usually a lot more discernable to the user in these cases, and sometimes your graphics or sound cards may not work quite right, from the user’s point of view. You do get Windows 2k/XP directors occasionally (crash from time to time, but when they work, boy are they powerful! Also tend to collaborate well, and have lots of contacts) and even Win 98se (highly traditional, unambitious), but the rest of the 9x tree are extinct, because no users want to buy that kind of thing any more.
You know what’s really sad? Suddenly I understand the theatre a lot better, and the difference between a director and a producer, which I’d never been able to grasp before.
Well, the divisions of labour that I use for the analogy here are actually quite ADC-specific – because that made the metaphors convenient. In the “real” theatre world, things can be quite different (most notably the technical jobs, which have the same names but are often totally different – however, the director/producer dynamic would probably also be a bit different…).
And then, of course, that set-up would be (probably – I’ve not worked in pro film/theatre/telly!) quite different to how the roles work in a film production, or a television show. All of these jobs have producers, but a telly producer is certainly a pretty different role to all the others…