by Jim Stinson
VideoMaker.com

Plan the shoot, shoot the plan, edit the planned shoot.

That's the mantra we introduced in last month's piece on production planning. We rejoin the discussion now with the amazing new idea that when production starts you should shoot what you planned to shoot.

Talk about obvious!

Not so fast. If that deceptively simple rule were routinely followed, Hollywood epics would never overrun their schedules and amateur productions would never look embarrassing (assuming they didn't crash and burn before completion). So let's review reasons for staying on-plan, gremlins that attack production plans, and ways to protect yourself against disasters, both serial and parallel.

The underlying concept is that crucial decisions are made in pre-production planning that will affect everything that follows, all the way through to the end of post production. A good planner keeps that long timeline in mind, the way a good chess player thinks many moves ahead.

Stick to the Plan

Sticking to a plan no matter what seems sort of, well retentive; but there are several reasons for resisting changes or at least studying them very carefully before making them.

First, remember the law of unintended consequences. Even small productions are complicated organisms with many interdependent parts. If you decide to shoot, say, scene 22 instead of scheduled scene 14, the cast, location, and time of day might be fine -- but what about the actor's distinctive Grateful Dead shirt, which got all muddy in scene 13 but has to be clean again for scene 22? Thinking fast, you run it through a Laundromat during lunch break. Uh-huh, but when you go to scene 14 later that shirt has to be dirty again -- with exactly the same stain pattern as before it was washed.

So things start to domino. Cleverly, you have the actor play scene 14 without the shirt, adding a line like, "Boy, I hope I can get that shirt clean; it's an heirloom." Right away, you've handed the editor two problems. Since the action is continuous across scenes 13 and 14, the character has no off-screen time in which to take off the shirt. Major jump cut. Also, the added line tells viewers that the shirt's valuable, which is totally irrelevant to the story and distracting from the point of the scene.

You're already thinking of fifty things at once, under time and money pressure to move, move, move! If you must make alterations, take the time you need to think them through. The second moral is that post production is very demanding. Once you wrap production, it's expensive and often impossible to re-open the shoot for vital pieces that are missing or mis-matched to other pieces.

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