The Hidden Hero: Why Preproduction is Vital
If you’re not doing preproduction, you’re preplanning to fail. One of the best things you can do for your story is to spend some time in preproduction. This week we’re going to take a look at a story I told last year and explore all the elements of preproduction that helped to make the video turn out well.
Welcome to Smartphone Storytellers, where it’s my goal to equip you with the skills you need to tell visual stories using the Smartphone you already own. It’s week two of “September is for Storytelling,” and things have kicked off great. We’ve already picked a winner for week one over on Instagram, but it’s a new week so it’s not too late to jump over and enter to win this week’s swag. Here on Youtube, this week is another chance to enter to win the Filmmaking kit - consisting of a Rode Wireless Go, Apurture Amaran 60x S, 80” tripod, and a Ulanzi camera grip. All you need to do is like this video, subscribe to the channel, and comment to answer the question I ask in the video. Each week is another chance to enter, so make sure to come back all four weeks!
This week we’re diving into preproduction. What’s the point - can’t we just grab our camera and start shooting? Sure, you can do that, but you’ll be missing a valuable step that’s going to help you to identify exactly what you need for your story.
Preproduction gives you the chance to think through all of the aspects of your story before you’re in a spot where you need to start executing. If you don’t do preproduction, you’ll find yourself either trying to figure out your story while filming it, or even worse, trying to find the story while you edit. You may still come out with a great story, but you decrease your chances of success.
Additionally, you’ll often find that things don’t always go to plan on a shoot. Maybe the weather isn’t working out, or the b-roll you plan to capture just isn’t working out like you want. If you go into a shoot day without a plan, then you’re going to be scrambling to both figure out your story while also problem solving the issues that come up. If you do preproduction, though, then you can approach the day with a plan A, but also able to keep a plan B and C in the back of your mind. You’ll already know your story, so you’re just figuring out what tweaks you need to make to make the story happen.
Every project is different, but there’s a few steps I like to do when I’m working through preproduction for a story. Not every step happens for every project, but it’s worth considering each of these steps to see what will help you in your process. Before we dig in too deeply, let’s first take a look at the project from last year. This is a project I produced for an organization called “Hope to Home.” They had recently received an award for their work in the community, and they needed a short video to give an overview for people in attendance.
When I was first approached by Hope to Home, I actually was not familiar with the organization. The first thing I did was head over to their website to get to know a little about them. It’s important to familiarize yourself with the story in any way you can. Now, if you’re telling a story of work that your organization is doing, that part is pretty easy. I also checked their social media presence to see if I could get an idea of the story, but this was all just to give me an introduction. After that, I set up a pre-interview.
PRE-INTERVIEW
The pre-interview can look very different depending on the story you’re telling, but it serves the same purpose. It’s essentially an informal conversation and interview to understand all of the elements of the story. In the case of Hope to Home, it was so I could understand the emotional impact of the work that they were doing. I could find statistics and facts all day long online, but I wanted to understand how their work connected with people on a deeper level. I typically view the preinterview as a “conversation over coffee” - sometimes it’s literally just that. I either meet with them for coffee, or we’ll jump on a call to talk through the story.
I have a few goals in mind when doing this. First, it’s to introduce myself to whoever’s story I’m telling. I want them to know me as someone who’s more than just the filmmaker, but as a person who’s invested in their story. This is especially important if I’m going to be interviewing a person and having them share their story. They need to be comfortable with me so that when it comes time for me to sit down to capture their interview on camera, they are more focused on talking with someone who feels more like a friend than a person behind a camera.
Secondly, I want to be able to find any details in the story that are going to help me when I go to put everything together. Often, I find that details come out in the preinterview that I had no idea existed, and it only serves to strengthen the story. These are things that if I didn’t know about them before the day of the shoot, I may not be able to capture them and as a result miss out on sections of the story that are important.
You don’t want to dive too deep into trying to get an emotional response in the pre-interview, as you want to keep some of that for when you’re capturing the story on camera. You still want the on-camera interview to have a sense of it being fresh. The pre-interview is a fact finding time, so you can just keep things a bit more shallow and don’t need to press too heavily into each moment, just make sure you’re getting the details you need to understand the story.
I like to take bullet point notes as I talk with the person. This helps me to review the notes later so that I remember each piece of the story, and then in the end figure out exactly what I want to cover in the actual on camera interview. I’d then take those notes and outline how I see the final story going, and write a list of questions from that outline. Not every story is going to have a formal interview, though, so in instances where I’m not focusing on telling a story through an interview, I take these notes back and craft a script.
INITIAL SCRIPT
With Hope to Home, I actually approached things in a slightly different manner than normal. In talking with the founder, I found he had a great sense of storytelling and knew the facts he wanted to make sure to get across. He had been telling this story for years, so he already had ironed out the best approach. So I actually had him write out a rough script for his story. I wasn’t going to capture him in an interview setting, but I was going to have him do the voiceover. As a result, I wanted to make sure the script had his “voice” in it. Everyone has a certain way they talk, a vocabulary they tend to use, so I wanted to capture that in this script. His first draft was actually really solid - the only issue was that it was too long for our intended final product. I told him to not worry about that, though, because my plan was to review the script and take it to the next step - structure.
SCRIPT REWRITE - STRUCTURE
Looking at his script, it actually had a really good flow to it. The biggest issue I found were that there were a few sections that, while they were great information, they ended up being somewhat filler for the main story we wanted to tell. I needed to evaluate all of the pieces in the story to understand which building blocks were key to our story. There were a few quotes from volunteers that would have worked well if we had that person on camera sharing their story, but since we’d have him reading the script, it made the quotes feel out of place. Similarly, there was a client testimony that wouldn’t have translated well if he delivered it. As a result, I took the main thoughts of those quotes and summed them up in some shorter sentences that made sense coming from the founder.
Last week I discussed the “where were you, where are you now, where are you going” structure. Looking back at this project, I somewhat wish we had set up the need a bit stronger to illustrate the “where were you” portion of the story. I recall him sharing the statistic of how when someone moves into an empty home after coming out of a traumatic situation, they were more likely to fall back into hard times. If they were able to make the place more of a “home,” though, then that statistic fell to below 10%. We ended up hitting on a similar quote to this near the close of the project, but I think it could have been even stronger if the initial need was set up earlier in the video.
As it is, the current script more so picks up exploring the “where are you now” scenario by exploring how Hope to Home meets the needs of their clients. It was hard to go too deep into the story in the slightly over 60 seconds we had for the final video, but I would have loved to go slightly deeper into the emotional impact on those impacted by the organization. As it is, though, it gives a solid idea of what Hope to Home does and the way that they are impacting the community. After crafting a script, it’s time to move into planning for shoot day.
SHOOT PLAN - SHOT LIST / STORYBOARD
Preproduction isn’t over once you script. You need to figure out if there are any other elements you need for the day of the shoot. Sometimes that’s as easy as just confirming the weather and location for the day and getting your gear set. Othertimes it helps to have a bit more information to work with. That’s where you create a shoot plan. I like to create a shoot plan before I head out. This isn’t always a formal written out plan, but I at least try to think through the shots I want to capture. Shot lists can be as simple as just a list of the elements at the event you want to capture, or it can be as detailed as the specifics of each shot. It really all depends on how in depth you want to go.
For Hope to Home, I knew what elements I wanted to capture. I didn’t write down a formal plan, but I did think through exactly what goes into their outreach. Before leaving the warehouse, I wanted shots of people gathering furniture, loading up the trucks, and smiling people interacting with each other. I wanted to get good coverage, so I’d focus on a variety of each shot. We’ll talk more about the actual shoot day later this month, but the important thing is getting a good variety.
After that, I wanted footage of the actual load in at the homes. Shots of people receiving the furniture, the conversations that happen between volunteers and those being served, and the moments that illustrate the organization at work. I also capture footage of the furniture being restored before it ever left the warehouse, but we ended up leaving this footage for future projects.
On other projects, you may have some specific shots you want to make sure you capture to tell your story. If you have a specific shot in mind, it helps to actually storyboard that shot out. This is especially important if you need to communicate the shot to anyone else involved. This helps get the look of the shot out of your head so people can understand what needs to happen. On a project like this, I don’t frequently storyboard, but if I’m working with a team and have specific moments I want captured, a storyboard will then come in handy. After shoot planning, you just need to prep the gear!
GEAR PREP
Gear prep takes place in preproduction because you want to make sure everything is ready before you arrive on set. When filming with a smartphone, you want to make sure you’ve got a full battery. Check to see if you have enough free space on your phone. It may help to have a USB Power Brick handy in case you run out of juice at the shoot, as filming on your phone will quickly deplete your battery. If you’re capturing audio, make sure the microphones are all charged as well. It may even help to get everything all rigged together so you know that when you get to the location, everything is ready to go. There’s nothing worse than getting to a location and realizing a piece of gear isn’t ready for the day. Trust me - that’s happened to me.
Preproduction is important because when it comes to filming, there’s a ton of moving parts. Even if you’re just capturing b-roll footage, you still need to be aware of the story you’re telling. Otherwise, you may get into the edit bay and realize you didn’t capture a piece you needed to effectively tell the story. Approach the shoot day with a willingness to be flexible as things change, but then make educated decisions on how to best change your plan based on the story you want to tell.
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See you guys next week!
