Saturday, October 12, 2013

Pre Production Planning

By Sarah Williams


The procedure of filming is a long one and incorporates far more planning and preparation than one may think. From past experience if this is not organised effectively, a lot may go wrong. In a team there are a lot of ideas and opinions flying about and if these are not well thought through, planned and communicated, the end result will not be successful. When exploring tips on how to make this pre-production process smoother and more efficient for future projects, I found the pre-production checklist put together by LAMBDA films. Which outlines three fundamental strategies to ease a process that can otherwise be fairly stressful. These included, scripting, storyboarding, and a treatment making the final aims of the project clear to everyone involved.

Don't get me wrong, I know the general location of what I'm looking for, I know my keys are in the house, or in the Norwich area... somewhere. I just don't have the organisational skill or the magic wand to pin-point where exactly.

You should be asking questions such as: What am I trying to achieve with my video? What am I going to shoot? What locations/people/resources do I need to accomplish my goals? What can I remove to simplify the process? Where is my video going to be shown and what do I need to do during production to make sure it displays correctly?

This process begins before you've even begun filming, I mean if you're begin editing a film that had no strategic or methodical terms of planning, then you're going to get nowhere when it comes to compiling the footage. I recently came across this LAMBDA Films video that details some simple ways of developing an idea of what you want your video to look like before you've even started shooting it. I've included a link to the video below.

Looking back at when I started becoming interested in filming and production I did not recognise the significance of storyboarding until it was way to late - on the day of filming when things became very intense and stressful with the deadline rapidly approaching. Without a structured storyboard the day was very unorganised and unenjoyable. I have however, learnt from past errors and since then have made sure that a well thought through storyboard always features in the pre-production process. Making sure that it continues to develop and progress all through the entire planning period to ensure that we are all happy with the end result.

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