Thank you. It's not easy to find time to do all of this that's for sure. The main thing is, as the director and/or producer, you need to make yourself available to shoot at nearly any time possible, then you can adapt to the ever-changing schedules of your peers. I was lucky enough to be working a part time job that only required me to work during lunch during the week, so I had weeknights and weekends free while we were shooting. I used weeknights to schedule with the cast and crew and weekends to shoot. During shooting months, I basically had no social life. It can be incredibly difficult to schedule that many people for free, I don't recommend that large of a cast to start with! :) But in the end, it was that, honestly, unless they've all been BSing me, everyone who was working on the project in any significant capacity really seemed to care about finishing and really seemed to like the material.
Costly mistakes did happen. I was 19 when we started production, 21 at the premiere, and 23 when the DVDs were finished (now). I originally thought it would take me less than a year haha! The worst setback was that we went through 2 lead actresses, the second of which filmed about 90% of her scenes before randomly deciding to never show up again, and it was tough getting everybody behind reshooting with a third actress, but it happened, and we're all happy it did as we have a much better movie because of it. If you are determined enough and give it the thought it requires, you can do almost anything. Make lemonade out of life's lemons and other such cliches.
It often came down to me saying "I will be damned if this doesn't get done, even if I have to do it myself!" ...and as you can see, that's often what happened :)
