This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
The Day of Production
When you have all of your story’s elements outlined, organized, and previsualized, you are (finally) ready to get to recording. Before you work through your first production, however, I’d like to share a couple of things for you to keep in mind.
Think Like a Duck
Even with all of the planning in the world, you will inevitably run into random problems. Expect this, and a project’s curveballs won’t rattle you as much. Keep calm, and handle the situation as professionally as possible. What will rattle your team or client is someone who doesn’t know how to adjust to and learn from a situation. As I often tell my students, you need to think like a duck: calm on the surface while paddling your tail off underwater.
Refer to a Paper Shot List
When you are working on production day, your brain will be on executing the details of the shot you’re immersed in. That level of focus tends to give you tunnel vision—perfect conditions for you to forget the specifics of another shot you need.
As I mentioned earlier, placing a printed shot list on a clipboard will give you a constant reminder of what you need to shoot. As you finish the individual shots, cross them off the list so you can easily and quickly see what’s left to do. Even better, hand the printed list to an assistant to look after so you can focus on shooting the video.
Use a Clapper/Slate
Lights. Camera. Action! The most recognizable object in cinema has got to be the clapper board, but many people don’t know how absolutely helpful one can be. The main piece of the board is a slate on which you can write scene, shot, and camera information. You can wipe the slate off and update it every time you start recording. Above that is an additional piece of wood on a hinge: the clapper. When this is brought down on the slate, it makes a loud clap. If you are using multiple cameras to record audio and video or syncing with a separate audio recorder, you can use that clapping sound as a synchronization point for the video and audio from all the cameras. The top part of the clapper board may also have a set of colors that you can use to correct color and exposure of the video later in post-production.
For a small investment, using one of these boards can pay big dividends. You can find physical boards as cheap as $17 on Amazon, as well as clapper board apps on your mobile device’s app store.
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FIGURE 3.17 A clapper/slate board
FIGURE 3.18 Jot down notes in your shot list as you complete each shot.
Stay Organized with Your Clapper and Shot List
Everything looks so simple when organized in a shot list, with its columns for scenes, shots, and takes. As you go though the shots in the field, however, your actors will need to make multiple takes of many or all of them. It just happens. You may go into a shoot with a list of 20 shots but come back with 90 video files, including all of the mistakes. How do you know which shots belong with which? If you’re using two cameras, how do you know which video files belong to which cameras? Your clapper board and shot list can help!
As you start the cameras recording, make sure you place the clapper board where both cameras can see it at the same time. This way, if there is a problem with one of the audio tracks, you can use the visual cue of the clapper board closing to synchronize that track with the rest. Seeing the video information on the slate will also help you synchronize the videos with one another
When you get a successful take in the field, immediately write that take’s number on your shot list (you do have it handy on a clipboard, right?). When you get back home, you will be reminded that Scene 1, Shot 001A had a successful take on Take 7.
Log Your Footage
When you record a series of videos for your story, it is a common practice to review all of the footage that you recorded to choose which of the files to use for the final video. This process is called logging and can be very time consuming.
Instead of watching all of the videos from beginning to end to see which takes are the best, however, you can perform a quick review of the videos without actually opening them. To do so, open the folder containing your videos in Finder (macOS) or File Explorer (Windows). Make sure the window is displayed in Icon view, and increase the size of the thumbnails. Each thumbnail shows the first frame of the corresponding video—the frame that shows all of the information written on the front of the slate. Now, record the name of each video file into a File Name field in your shot list and move to the next shot in your list. Having your notes and the thumbnails handy will speed up the process of logging your footage enormously.