From the course: Corporate Video Essentials: Preproduction

Setting a schedule

From the course: Corporate Video Essentials: Preproduction

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Setting a schedule

- Setting a shoot schedule is a really important aspect of production. And you have to think about all the possibilities and many things that you don't control. So we're not going to be able to get the tanker shot that we wanted. But can we still get the tanker wash later this afternoon? - Sure. Okay. That'd be great. - Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sometimes, you know, we have to adjust. So we'll try to find some other things we could film. And then, but I think maybe right after lunch, we could go grab the tanker wash shot? Okay, if that's okay with you. - Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not enough to say when you're going to arrive, and when you're going to leave. You really want to think through every portion of the day. The ramp-up is always slower than you think. It just takes people a long time to get parked, get in, get their gear, get organized, sign in if there's some kind of sign in procedure, etc. So it's just important to leave enough time for that opening entrance. Another area that you really want to look at in your schedule is transitions. That might be transitions from one location to another, transitions between one interviewee and another, even if it's in the same location, because you might need to flip the lighting or change something in the background. So those transitions often take time. Maybe you're moving from one floor to another. Have you left enough time really to have everybody put their gear on a cart, get in the elevator, move around? I was in a building where three out of the four elevators were out of service. It took forever to get between floors. We actually ended up offloading stuff and having people just run up and down stairs. So there are always things that take time, and transitions is one of them. Another thing that takes time and is often left out of a shoot schedule is the time to offload your media. Yes, the cards will get full, depending on the timeframe, and how much you're shooting, and your shooting spec. You have to be sure you have enough time built in to offload those cards. Another thing you want to be able to do is media manage and back up those cards. So again, don't just leave time at the end of the day, like, oh, the shoot is wrapped, and then everything will somehow magically be backed up. That's not going to happen. You need to have a couple of times during the day to do that work. Because that's the most important thing you can do, is make sure you walk out of there with the footage you need. Another thing that's really important to me, maybe because I'm an Italian-American, is I like to have food on the set. Not that I want to have lots of open food containers or problems like that, but just that people feel fed. So if we're starting super early in the morning, six o'clock in the morning, I'm going to have coffee and bagels, for example, or something like we call a walking breakfast, maybe a breakfast wrap or something. So everybody can like pick it up and go. Especially if we have a long setup, I want to be sure we have lunch. Maybe we have to do what's called staggered meals. A lot of times I'll have, you know, team A and team B. One team is wrapping up the gear. One team goes and has lunch. Then that team comes back and sets up the camera for the afternoon. The first team goes and has lunch. Anything you can do to speed up the process of the shoot. but be sure that everybody's taken care of, your crew and your clients. So you have to think about all of those different conditions and concerns when you're building a production schedule. I really don't generally involve a lot of people outside my team in the production schedule. Obviously, I will make a secondary schedule for the client if there's a lot of interviews, like employee interviews, so that each one of those people knows when they need to show up. But I don't need to burden them with what's happening with my crew, because my crew schedule might have all kinds of details on it. It might have details about gather wild sound at this point in time while the crew is doing X, Y, or Z, or it might say don't forget to offload media cards during lunch. I don't really want them thinking about those details, nor do I want them asking about those details. If I do need to involve a stakeholder, then I might have a secondary version of the schedule that just involves those people that they need to see and know when those people are needed onset. There's a couple of rules of thumb I just want to convey to you about scheduling, since I've done this for a little while. I will say, if you have a very interview-heavy schedule, and you're doing them live on location as opposed to in a studio, you really don't want to book more than two or three interviews in a morning segment and two or three interviews in an afternoon segment. So six in a day is really pushing it. It just there's a lot of transitions between people, especially if you're moving in locations, even if you're just making slight adjustments to the background, you'd be surprised how much time you need for those transitions in and out. So that's something to be mindful of when scheduling interviews. The biggest mistake I see with schedule creation is putting 5,000 shots in one day. It just doesn't happen that way. And the problem with overloading your schedule with so many shots is that you're probably going to miss other more important shots. So because the crew feels like they have to move fast from one to one to one to one thing, they never get a secondary angle of the first thing. Or they never wait for a moment and see, oh, you know, this person is doing this action, and it would be so great to get them walking through the shot. Let's wait another minute before we start rolling. Because they're so worried about trying to get way too much. So I often find that less is more. I fill in those gaps. I certainly have a secondary list, a wishlist, if you will, of other B-roll I want to collect. So yeah, if we're running ahead of schedule, great. I have plenty of shots I can get. But what I don't want is to have the crews show up and say, oh my God, this is going to be a nightmare day. And from hour one, they're already depressed. So it's much better go in looking at it and thinking, this is pretty realistic. We can get this done.

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