Producer, ARAY Productions

My name is Mark Salyer and I am a producer of media, television and film. Well, it really is kind of like being a CEO of production and you're really kind of in charge of everything. So it's hard to even say like, what do you do? 'Cause you kinda do everything or at least you have to know a little bit about everything. But at the end of the day, I think a good producer is a good storyteller. Currently, we have a couple of film projects, one of which actually was just finished and is actually here in The Virginia Film Festival this year. It is called "Ladies Most Deject" and it is a story of a family that is dealing with the repercussions of the drug epidemic in Appalachia. Well, I would call myself more of a creative producer, so I'm really there developing ideas as well as managing the actual production itself. So for this particular project, I co-wrote the script, and so I really became affiliated with it from the very beginning and you know, with mapping the story and coming up with of what we wanted to say and how like, the scope of the project as well, because I think that's very important as a producer to look at something right from the beginning and understand kind of how big something is or how small it is or how easy it is to produce or how much money it's gonna take. I mean, I pretty much was involved in every aspect. I was involved in casting, I found the director, who also was a UVA person, Marty Elcan, who lives in Los Angeles. And you know, I found all the crew, I basically developed the budget and you know, all of these things I had help with. I had a lot of co-producers who worked with me on it and for a small project, we were a fairly small, tight team. But it really was my responsibility ultimately to kind of pull it all together. So that's a producer.