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Director's Chair: Planning Your Shoot

If you go out into the field or studio without a plan for your shoot, you will end up wasting a great deal of time deciding what you want to do. In this industry, as in others, time is money. It is much more cost-effective to make your shooting decisions sitting at home alone or with a small pre-production team than to make those decisions on location while the cast and crew wait for you to make up your mind.

The first place to start in planning your shoot is with a look at the purpose of the video and the intended audience. Knowing why you are shooting your footage, as well as the audience for which you are shooting, is very important when planning your shoot.

For a promotional video, you have to decide what shots will best show the wonderful assets of the organization or location. If you are trying to persuade an audience, identify those shots that will best support your point of view. For instance, if shooting a fundraising piece for a new facility, you would want images of the facility looking its worst, showing worn-out equipment and using a telephoto lens to make the rooms look smaller and the spaces cramped. For showing an audience how to weld, you would have to include the equipment setup, safety features and procedures, prepping the materials and the welding process itself in a step-by-step process.

Knowing the purpose of the video will also help you plan for special equipment you may need. Do you want smooth-moving shots that need a dolly? Maybe you'll need several cameras to catch one-of-a-kind actions from multiple angles. Walk your client through the purpose of your video, so that very little catches you by surprise on location.

Knowing your audience is also very important when planning your shoot. If you’re shooting for a younger audience weaned on MTV, you will need to make your camera movements quicker and less fluid, with perhaps moving angles and more camera movement than for productions for an older audience. This doesn't mean you go out and shoot handheld grungy video just because you are shooting for a younger audience. You can still shoot with a plan, a tripod and a purpose; you just need to be willing to move away from conventional steady video and maneuver the camera on your tripod in a more seemingly haphazard way. Really good haphazard shooting that emphasizes the message you're trying to send is done with a great deal of planning, superb camera control and, above all else, a…