Thursday, 7 November 2013

Pre Production Checklist

By Alex Jones


I must admit, I'm hugely unorganised. I rarely have a fixed location for anything, be it keys, mobile phone or even the bacon sandwich I'd mislaid two days ago, (turns out I'd left it in the bathroom while looking for the sponges). In fact I recently learnt my housemates have made a habit of hanging up my keys whenever they see them somewhere they know I'll never find - and I'm sure they're sick and tired of the phrase "can you ring my phone?".

Don't get me wrong, I know the general location of what I'm looking for, I know my keys are in the room, or in the Norwich location... somewhere. I just don't have the systematic mindset or the magic wand to pin-point where precisely.

Working on films however requires me to be a lot more disciplined, so I've been forced to up my game in the organisation department. Such large collaborative projects require a high degree of communication and mutual understanding. The materials of the pre production phase are totally integral to an efficient and seamless production process and helps facilitates the aforementioned communication and understanding.

web of creativity is properly managed and the final objectives and decisions are conveyed to the key people in the production. Thankfully, there are a number of ways to do this and in this short article, I'll be showing you how.

Once you have a basic way of coordinating what you're going to film, it makes the tremendous task of searching through the footage and putting everything together a lot easier. Then when it comes to editing you just need to take some time and sort the clips into suitable bins or folders. Unfortunately this is something I'm yet to learn, only when I'm ripping my hair out through editing related stress do I think "why didn't I just rename that clip?". I can only encourage you to learn from my production problems and take some time to arrange, beginning with pre-production which will indeed assist you later on. That way you won't have your friends tidying up after you.

Let me know what methods you use to streamline your pre production process in the comments below!




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