Starting a movie production company requires funding and investment.
When starting a movie production company as a business, you must acquire all the legal requirements needed for a business operation. However, for independent movies not for commercial purposes (usually for student films and personally funded films or those with film grants not meant to be shown in regular theaters), such a movie production company only needs a company name. It doesn't need business permits and other business licensing requirements.
Funding
Whether your movie production company is meant as a business or as a production name for your school work or for an art/independent film production to be shown in film festivals, the first thing you must have is initial funding for the company. Filmmaking requires a number of financial investments in order to pay for office space (independent filmmakers typically use their houses as production offices), payment for salaries of employees (if any), talent fees of people working on the actual production, and purchase or rental of production equipment.
Production Employees and Talents
Producing a movie is a collaborative work. There should be experts in various fields from the financial to the creative aspects of production. A business enterprise doing a commercial movie has employees like in any other business.
Every production company needs talents, also referred to as crew members, who are knowledgable in movie production. Some of them are employed as in-house talents meaning they have regular compensation and benefits like workers in other fields; while some of them are contractual talents which are usually known as freelancers. While not limited to the following, every company needs to have a producer, writer, director, cinematographer, production designer, editor, musical director, production manager and production assistants. For independent movie companies, most crew members multitask. For big production companies, the list reaches up to hundreds of crew members.
Production Equipment
A movie production company must invest in equipment, including camera, lights and grip equipment. It's also ideal to invest in computers and other machines needed for editing, along with computer software for various video editing needs. As these investments require thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, small-scale movie production companies consider renting the more expensive equipment like movie cameras and big lights.
Concepts and Scripts for Production
Making a movie starts from a concept. This is is typically a one-sentence idea or summary that best describes what the film's story is all about. For example, according to the IMDb website, "Avatar" is about "Jake, a paraplegic marine dispatched for a unique mission to the moon Pandora, becomes torn between following his orders and protecting the other world he now feels is his home." A concept is expanded into a story, then into a sequence treatment (like a script but with only descriptions of the scenes and there are no dialogues yet), and finally, the treatment is made into a script.
