You’re at the airport and everything’s going wrong.

Your bags are too heavy, so the airline staff make you take things out. Which also means now you have a hairdryer and a pair of jeans in your purse.

You forgot to dump your water bottle and end up getting a five-minute lecture from the border agent who’s gotta be 20 years younger than you. You have to go through the creepy body scanner three times because you’re so frazzled you keep leaving things in your pockets.

And of course, of COURSE, you decided to wear lace up boots.

So yeah. Totally nailed the border crossing.

Okay, but what about the opposite? 

You’re so traumatized from the last time you got screwed at the airport that you triple check everything and speed through border control like a skater on fresh ice.

This is the difference between a rough ride and a smooth one. And when it comes to creating micro films, you want your production process to be as smooth as possible.

You want your shoot to be as smooth as soft butter on warm toast. 
 

READ THIS BAD BOY IN ITS FULL GLORY ON THE STORY ENVELOPE BLOG>>>>

Okay, now I’m just making myself hungry.

I recently did an out of town micro film shoot that was probably one of the most complex production I’ve ever done solo.

And this wasn’t any old shoot. It was a premium marketing film that had to be perfect: the message had to be on point and so did the footage.

There was one main subject. Two periphery subjects. So that meant three interviews. Plus two sets of B-roll subjects and a single that had to be incorporated in the action sequences. That’s 8 people I had to communicate with on the day of the shoot.

On top of that, I was jet lagged and had only just met my subjects the day before the shoot. 

And yet…weirdly…the shoot went so smoothly that when we finished on time at the end of the day I had to check myself. I still had tons of energy and brain power left, and nothing had gone wrong.

It was weird.

How had one of the most complex shoots of my solo filmmaking career not been exhausting?

There are actually a lot of reasons. And I’m going to write a series of articles about what I learned from this shoot. Because honestly I’m pretty excited about what I discovered. This shoot taught me so much about what to do right.

Normally in filmmaking you learn from your mistakes. But this time, I learned from my precautionary measures.  

I was so terrified about potentially underperforming because of jet lag that I over-prepared all over the place. This means I got to see the results of over preparation – when it makes a difference, and when it doesn’t.

But today we’re just going to talk about three things that’ll make your complex shoots go smoothly.

I triple-dog guarantee these three practices.

First: Bring easy-to-use lighting. 

And we’re going to go over what that actually means!

Second: Set clear expectations with ALL participants.

Not just the star of the film, every single person.

Third: Do a thorough tech analysis before the shoot.

And I’m going to explain what I mean by that.

These aren’t ground breaking pieces of advice. But I have some qualifiers for each one that I would have found valuable a couple years ago when I was first starting out.

So let’s do this!

BRING EASY-TO-USE LIGHTING

I have a studio light that takes me half an hour to set up.
It’s a beautiful softbox on a nice sturdy stand. It creates gorgeous soft light that wraps around my subjects like a warm blanket, creating photo-shopped-looking skin without any effort.

Cool.

But it’s a pain in the ass to set up. 

And take down. And move around.

It’s about a meter wide. It’s over 20 pounds. And it looks best when used with a hot light which then needs to be gelled if I want to mix it with natural light.

This is the first light I ever bought.
And so naturally I’m going to keep it forever. But I’ll probably never bring it with me on a shoot again. Because it’s the opposite of easy to use.

The lighting you should bring on any complex solo shoot needs to be so easy to use that a 12-year-old could set it up in 3 minutes and get decent results. 

That means it needs to fit six requirements:

It needs to be:

1. Light – less than a couple pounds.

2. Cool to touch – no hot lights – only LEDs or Fluorescents.

3. Diffuse – You don’t want to be dealing with sharp hard light when you’re running a complex solo shoot – unless for some reason you’re doing film noire. But that seems unlikely.

4. Easy to move around – no big bulky stands. No convoluted cords. And ideally you’ll be able to charged your lights in advance and run cordless for at least an hour.

5. 5500 kelvin – i.e. daylight balanced. If you’re really lucky you’ll get a light whose colour temp can be modulated from 2800 kelvin to 6500 kelvin. But just as good is straight up daylight balanced so you can mix your light with window light no problem.

6. Dimmer adjustable. It’s much better to be able to adjust the brightness of your light then have to make changes to your exposure settings because your light only gives you one level of brightness.

You might be wondering which magical light does all of these things. I’m not affiliated with Westcott Ice Lights, but I do own two of them. And they are hands down the best filmmaking investment I made in 2018.

I bought one, used it, loved it so much, that I bought another one specifically for this shoot I did recently. 100% worth it.

There are other small lights on the market that are as good or almost as good as the Ice Lights. When you’re renting lights or deciding what to buy for long term microfilmmaking projects, use my easy-to-use lighting list and make sure all 6 aspects are covered.

I usually take about 45 minutes to set up an interview shot. 
I like the framing to be immaculate. The background needs to be artfully arranged. The framing has to suit the subject. And the lighting needs to be on point. When I was using more unwieldy lights, I had to use up about 20 minutes of that set-up time just for putting the light together.

But with easy-to-use lights, the set up is so minimal that you can focus on lighting placement and experimentation. There isn’t that pressure to stick with the first set up you try. You can move the lights around. See if the image looks best with a hair light instead of a fill light. Experiment with the levels of lighting

This lesson of using easy-lighting was so clearly demonstrated to me on this most recent shoot that I couldn’t go back if I wanted to.

I’m still interested in using more complex lights, but only on a multi-person shoot where I have an assistant or two. For narrative work when you have a full production team, it’s worth it to use massive, annoying lights. Because they really do produce the best results.

On a solo shoot, the most important factor in getting great results is your agility. 

The more agile you are, the more you can respond to your creative impulses and the surprise gifts of your subjects.

Once you’ve got your lighting under control it’s time to make sure you’ve set ultra clear expectations with your subjects.
 

SET CLEAR EXPECTATIONS

It helps if you think of yourself as a hospitality professional or a therapist when dealing with every single person who’s going to be on camera.

Most people are in some mode of freak-out before they have to go on camera.
And that freak-out mode will be even higher if they don’t know what to expect.

Or alternatively they might be completely unaffected but still manage to hijack your shoot because they don’t know what’s supposed to happen.

Your goal is to communicate the expectations so clearly that your subjects become like members of a production team. They actually end up helping you achieve the goal of the film rather than hindering it.

Let me break this down.

There are three steps to clear communication:

1. Before the shoot – communicate what’s expected of them on the day, preferably in writing.
2. On the the day of the tech scout – go over expectations and timelines again.
3. On the day of the shoot – make sure your subjects know what’s happening and what’s going to happen.

Let’s break down each of these elements.

1. Before the shoot communicate what’s expected of them on the day:

• What they need to bring.
• What they need to wear.
• What they need to prepare.
• What they need to think about.
• What time they’ll be needed to participate.
• And what they’ll be doing during each time slot.

Here’s my process:

Two weeks before my most recent shoot, I sent out an email to the point person for the shoot with a few important vitals:

• There was a pdf with recommendations on what to wear and why.
• A schedule for the shoot date that included an hour-to-hour breakdown, the times when each person would be interviewed, and when they would participate in the B-roll shots.
• I also included a note mentioning that nobody needed to prepare anything else. That it was my job to make sure they looked good and sounded good. And that the interview was more like a chat. So basically don’t worry, I’ll make sure you sound great.

Next comes the day of the tech scout.

2. Go over the schedule and expectations again on the day of the tech scout.

Somewhere between a few weeks to a day before a shoot, you’ll go to your location and take pictures, looking at framing options, look at sound and lighting issues, and meet all the subjects.

At this time you need to reiterate all the expectations you’ve already set. Get your subjects comfortable. See if they have any questions. Put them at ease.

And finally, we’ve got the day of the shoot.

3. On the day of the shoot, make sure you walk every subject through the following things:

• When they’re going to be on camera.
• How long it’s going to take.
• Roughly what you’re going to be doing.

Your subjects should be so familiar with what’s going to happen on the day of the shoot, that if a stranger showed up, they’d be able to explain it to them. 

When this happens, you’ll have your subjects reminding you of things you might have forgotten.

This is what happened to me on my most recent shoot.

When I arrived on the shoot day, I walked through everything with each person individually. They’d now had three exposures to the day’s logistics and expectations.

Later in the day a b-roll sequence we were shooting was interrupted because a set of new subjects had arrived and we needed to get their coverage. Once I’d finished up with these new subjects, I’d completely forgotten about the previous unfinished B-roll.

I was surprised when one of my subjects reminded me that we needed to go back and finish that previously unfinished sequence.

That’s when the power of clear communication hit me. 

Because I’d set my subject’s expectations, she had in her head that the previous sequence was unfinished, and she wasn’t going to feel like her participation was complete until we finished it.

When you’re doing a solo shoot with  a lot of participants, it can be easy to forget things.

By setting clear expectations you’re actually harnessing the production power of every single person that’s on the set. They become your allies in ensuring that production moves forward. They want the production to be a success. And since they know all the logistics, they know how to help you succeed.

If I were to give you one tip on working with subjects it would be to use the power of narration as you go. 

Always be communicating what’s happening and what’s going to happen.

Imagine you’re at a bus stop. 

There’s a digital sign at the bus stop. It says the next bus will arrive in 30 minutes.

Darn, that’s a long time.

It’s raining, and you don’t want to get cold. So you step into a nearby coffee shop and grab a latte. You hang out for twenty minutes. Read the paper. And then head out to the bus stop five minutes early.

Sure you would’ve rather caught a bus immediately, but since you knew the timeline you could take appropriate action. No anxiety. No irritation.

Now imagine that same bus stop with no sign. 

You go to check your transit app but you’ve left your phone at home. There’s nobody waiting at the bus stop so you have nobody to ask. You go into the coffee shop nearby and the barista says that bus comes every half an hour.

You ask her when the last one came by. She has no idea. So you hurriedly order a coffee while keeping an eye on the bus stop.

As soon as your drip coffee is poured you race back out to the bus stop.
Where you stand and wait in the rain for half an hour, getting more and more annoyed. When the bus finally arrives you’re so pissed you want to yell at the bus driver.

He cheerfully says hello as you get aboard the bus, and you growl a disgruntled response and slink to the back where you scowl all the way to your destination.

Do you see the difference?
And the only thing different between the two experiences is that in the first example the expectations were clear. That digital bus sign told you where you were now and where you were going to be. It told you about your present and your future, so you could make an appropriate choice.

You could have caught a cab. You could have walked. You could have gone home. You could have gone into the coffee shop. It didn’t matter. What mattered is that you knew what to expect.

Setting clear expectations is the cheapest way to make a solo film shoot run smoothly. 

This last recommendation is so easy and has such a big pay off that not doing it would be crazy.
 

DO A THOROUGH TECH ANALYSIS

There was one area where I messed up. 

Sound. This is my achilles heal. I have a love hate relationship with sound. Over the years I’ve figured out how to get reliably good sound. But it’s still the thing that’s most likely to go wrong for me. And I should probably remind myself of that every single time I do a shoot.

Although I went through me regular tech analysis process, I made one key mistake. 
I forgot that in an office setting there is often the strange white noise of fans. Forgetting this means that I didn’t make using an overhead mic a priority.

If you own a mic stand with boom arm you know how annoying to move around they are.
They also don’t fit in a suitcase normally. So I opted for using a short mic stand that would put the mic below the subject, pointed towards them.

Never again.

My next purchase is a light weight and travel-sized mic stand with arm.
Because I glossed over the sound in my tech analysis, I’m going to have to deal with annoying white noise and a less-than-ideal signal-to-noise ratio.

The sound is still good. But not as good as if I’d had that mic stand with me.

Mistake.

But what did I get right?

And what should you do before every shoot?

 Do a tech scout where you go to the location and take pictures of every single potential framing option for your subjects and the main action sequences. 

1. Figure out where you’re going to do the interview, do a few rough frame ups, and take pictures.

2.  Then go back to your office or hotel room or whatever and analyze them. Choose the best options and pull them into a word or pages doc and look at them side by side.

3. Once you’ve decided on the framing you’re going to use, turn that doc into a pdf.
Then either print it out, or bring that pdf on your tablet or laptop and use it as a shooting reference. You might only refer to it once on the day of the shoot. But the fact that you have it will put your mind at ease.

And the fact that you’ve gone through a three part analysis means that those shots will be glued to your brain. 
Which means that you won’t have to make those big decisions on the day of the shoot. Which means you won’t fall into decision fatigue so easily.

I find framing, especially the framing of interviews, to be some of the most important decisions I make. What you include in the frame will tell a story and create a mood. Especially when the frame is static as it is in an interview.

If you get the basic framing decided in advance, you’ll have more brain space to organize what’s within the frame itself on the day of the shoot. 

Whereas if you leave all of your framing decisions for the day of the shoot, you’re going to have both less time and less mental energy for the set dec, subject prep, and lighting.

Because I had firmly decided on all of the interview framing in advance, I had time to make everything within the shoot look beautiful.

This meant, setting up background objects that would tell a story and create a feeling.
Pulling a desk out of the way so that it wouldn’t ruin the corner of a shot. Moving plants. And messing around with subject placement.

I also had time to deal with the sound issues I hadn’t anticipated. Like traffic noise outside. Ringing landlines. And a ventilation system that sounded terrible.

Based on what I learned during this latest shoot this is my new 7-part process for doing a tech analysis:

1. Get subject to send photos of the space including all windows in advance – basically as soon as the shoot has been confirmed.
2. Analyze their photos, consider potential lighting issues and potential interview locations.
3. Ask the subject about potential sound disruptions – when is it loudest outside and inside the location? Is there traffic noise?
4. Organize an overhead mic stand NO MATTER WHAT. Even if this means buying a mic stand and getting it delivered to the client’s office. It’s worth the expense and time.
5. Do a thorough tech analysis the day before the shoot taking photos of all framing possibilities.
6. Examine the photos and firmly decide on which framing options to go with.
7. Create a pdf with the framing that will be used, and bring the pdf to the shoot as a reference.

These seven steps may seem really OCD or anal retentive or whatever. But I’m telling you they saved me so much time.

It would seem like you would lose time by doing so much prep work. 
But everything becomes easier when you tackle a shoot in stages. The day of the shoot is easier. Your shots turn out better. Your edit becomes easier. Your client is happier.

And not that you’re doing this for looks – but you also look more professional and give your client the feeling that they’re really being taken care of.

If you’re doing this project for yourself and not a client, then you give your subject the sense that what you’re doing is really important to you. This creates buy in. The more something matters to you, the more your subjects will care about it.

Conscientiousness is transferable. 

Let’s review:

Three ways to make sure a complex shoot runs super smoothly are by bringing easy-to-use lights, setting clear expectations with every person involved, and doing a thorough tech analysis.

Easy to use lights will save you time and energy. They’ll allow you flexibility. And they’ll mean you can focus on creativity and bringing out the best in your subjects.

Setting clear expectations means your subjects become a part of the production team. They make the shoot run more smoothly. The remember thins for you. They become active participants rather than passive subjects. This is a good thing. Unless you’re doing a cinema verite process where you want them to forget you exist, setting expectations is important.

And finally doing a thorough tech analysis is an energy saver and a time saver.
It allows you to have way more brain space and energy on the day of the shoot and to prevent annoying errors from leaking into your footage. It means you’ll save a lot of time in post production. And a lot of pain. Because you won’t be struggling with less-than-ideal footage.

At the airport on the way to catch an international flight with a bunch of gear in my suitcase, I got the dreaded “Your suitcase it 3 lbs overweight. You’re going to have to remove something.”

Sigh.

I rolled my suitcase off to the side, zipped it opened, pulled out the two compression bags of clothing, grabbed a small tripod and my umbrella, stuffed them in my purse, put the compression bags back on top of the gear, close up the suitcase, and brought it back to the baggage counter.

It took me less than three minutes.
This time my bag was right at 50 lbs. Perfect. I’m on my way.

The only reason this went so smoothly and didn’t feel totally embarrassing was because I’d organized my suitcase so well that taking out 3 lbs took next-to-no effort, and I was 2 hours early for my flight.

I was so paranoid about making sure everything run smoothly that I made sure I over-prepared and arrived early for every appointment I had  – from catching my planes to doing the pre-interview.

This paranoia didn’t make me crazy.
Because it was based on knowing what could potentially go wrong. Meaning it was rational paranoia.

This was my greatest takeaway from my most recent shoot: rational paranoia combined with an action plan will make even a complex shoot run smoothly. 
 

Thanks for joining me on this ride!