Week 5 - Planning Documentation

With my ideas and vision for the piece ready, I had to start my pre-production documentation. This involved everything from noting my initial ideas, through to scripting and storyboarding, through to organising the shoot.

This process actually started somewhere closer to week 3, but knowing that usually ideas develop or receive creative criticism you shouldn't get too far Pre-Production without an idea that both you and the client have confidence in. So I had to go back and make changes to existing work such as script drafts and the Proposal etc. This is helpful as not only do you replace the old ideas with the new but you can go back and run over general mistakes, hopefully ironing out issues with the documentation as well as the idea.

The further through the project we got the more I wanted to improve the quality of my Pre-Production documentation. To achieve this I worked at taking the existing examples of documentation templates and looked for examples of professional documentation. Taking elements from both, I could pick and choose elements that were both professional but also suited to a tiny production. For instance on the call sheet, I included the professional element of having a short shot list for each set or scene but also put less detail into personnel  details as there were so few other people apart from me on the project. For the shooting script I mixed in many elements from a formal Shot List. As I had much less shots than on any other project, I incorporated the more detailed elements of the shot list into my shooting schedule.

The find these examples I used 2 books as my main source of information:

Paul Hardy, PH, (2005), Filming on a Microbudget, Great Britain, CPI Cox & Wyman

Robert Angell, RA, (2004), Getting into Films & Television, Great Britain, How to Books Ltd

Both of these books are really essential guides for young, low budget film makers and give great overviews of industry practice and cutting corners for small crew, no budget films. From these books I reproduced call sheets, shot lists and scripts based on professional practice.

I also used a new programme, Celtx, to draft my scripts. This programme drastically increases the speed of writing by giving you auto formatting based on the element you are writing e.g dialogue, descriptions, directions, names etc. The downside here was that the formatting is changed when importing into other programmes such as Microsoft Word. In the future I have been advised to export to HTML to retain the formatting and then into a word processor.

Throughout the process I also tried to prioritise certain bits over others. Obviously the shooting schedule, call sheet and risk assessment needed to be handed in before camera equipment could be booked, but in terms of the whole project and the limited amount of time I could commit to this single project I had to think what needed to get done when. This was aided by my Production Schedule, where at the beginning of the project I listed which items were dependent on other pieces, listed which pieces these were, then when it came to developing these it made it much easier to plot out and prioritise individual elements.