Pre-Production?

April 7. 2008 by Ed Tworek.

Pre-Production?  What’s that?  Pre-Production is where you save money!  Pre-Production is the process of planning every step of a video project, from the concept to distribution.  Why is this important?  Consider this, you want to shoot a TV commercial, you hire a production company, hire talent, and set a shoot date at your location.  Everyone arrives at the designated call time.  When all the greeting is completed, everyone has had a cup of coffee, and the camera and lighting is set up, you then tell everyone that you need to take some time to come up with a script.  What!, the crew exclaims!  The crew is ready, but you are not.  Well, they say, it’s your money.  And it is.  If you do not take the time to plan your video shoot, you will spend money needlessly.  It is much quicker to shoot a project if there is a script.  You do not want an expensive video crew sitting around while you decide what to do.  If there is a plan, an experienced crew can come in and shoot every scene quickly and efficiently.  The talent will also be able to perform better if they are familiar with the script content, and if it is a commercial, they probably will have the script memorized on shoot day. 

Here is a real world example of what I am talking about, I did this shoot 2 weeks ago…

The project is a video home tour.  Call time is 12 noon.  This client allocates 2 hours to shoot the home, talent stand ups and voice over as well as b-roll of surrounding ammenities, such as shopping and a golf course.  Not a lot of time, but it is possible to do.  At noon, all the parties have arrived and we begin our walk around of the home to familiarize ourselves with the property.  It is at this time, that the talent first sees the bullet points he is to discuss about the home.  There is no script, we will be crafting one on the fly.  Lighting is set, camera is ready and the talent is mic’d. 

12:30, we begin our first attempt at the opening.  Wrong wording, too many words, not the correct adjectives…  By 1:15, we have completed the stand ups and VO, we now have 45 minutes left to shoot 6 rooms, an agent intro and close and the b-roll.  The agent stumbles, but we get her done in 15 minutes.  30 minutes left.  Shoot, re-light, shoot, re-light…6 times.  The house is done, we are now 20 minutes over.  We race to pack up.  We still have to shoot 4 seperate locations for the b-roll, each require driving no less than 10 minutes. One of the locations requires permission to enter the property, this takes 20 mintues.  All told, this 2 hour shoot takes 4 1/2 hours. 

Since you are paying by the hour for this shoot, you just wasted 2 1/2 hours because of no planning.  Granted, this shoot would have gone overtime because of the b-roll locations, but we could have saved no less than 1 hour if there was a script.

Pre-production is really the key to making your video project a huge success.  If you take a few hours to meet with the production company( which usually costs nothing),  and plan the shoot, you will be much more satisfied with the outcome of your project. 

Ed

www.corpvid.com

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