Chapter 16: Pre-Production — Scripting, Storyboarding, Shot Lists, Schedules, and Budgets That Prevent Chaos

"Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Overview

Two crews are handed the same assignment: a three-minute documentary short about a neighborhood bike-repair shop. Same subject, same shop, same phone-and-a-mic kit, the same Saturday morning. One crew shows up cold — "we'll figure it out on the day." The other spent ninety minutes at a kitchen table the night before, writing.

Watch the two mornings. The cold crew arrives at nine, when the shop is bright and busy and loud; the espresso machine next door and the traffic outside make the interview audio a hissy mess, and by the time they've thought about where to sit the owner, the good soft morning light through the front window is gone. They shoot the owner talking for twenty minutes and almost no B-roll, because nobody wrote down what to point the camera at. They leave at noon exhausted, and three weeks later, in the edit, they discover there is no way to cut the interview shorter without an ugly jump in the picture, no shot of the hands doing the work, and no wide shot to open on. The video is a hostage tape. It never gets finished.

The planned crew arrives at seven-thirty, before the shop opens, because the schedule said the interview happens in the quiet hour and the exterior gets shot at the shutter-up when the light is soft and low. They have a shot list taped to the back of the monitor. They get the interview clean in forty minutes because they already know the six questions and where the light and the mic go. Then they work down the list — the hands truing a wheel, the wall of tools, a customer dropping off a bike, the shutter, the sign — crossing off each shot. They leave by eleven with everything the edit will need, and a month later the piece cuts together in an afternoon.

The variable was not talent, gear, or luck. It was pre-production — the planning stage you met in Chapter 1 (§1.2), the cheapest of the three stages because you are only spending thought. This is the chapter where the book's least glamorous and most powerful throughline finally does its work: fix it in pre, not in post. Everything in Part IV — the shoot, the interview, the coverage — runs better or worse almost exactly to the degree that this chapter's paperwork got done. Planning is not homework you do to feel responsible. It is where the video is actually won, on paper, for free, before a single problem has had the chance to get expensive.

This chapter also begins Project 2, your three-minute documentary short. You will not shoot anything for it yet. You will plan it — and by the end you will have the first real documents of a real production: a treatment, a shot list, and a schedule.

In this chapter you will learn to:

• Turn an idea into a plan by writing a treatment — the video described in a paragraph, before any camera appears.
• Write the two kinds of script you will actually use — the two-column (A/V) script and the outline script — and know which one a project needs.
• Build a storyboard and a shot list that catch problems on paper and give the edit the pieces it needs.
• Turn a shot list into a schedule for the day, and see how that schedule becomes a call sheet (Chapter 18).
• Plan a budget in money, time, and favors, and run a location scout — a recce — that no shoot should skip.

Learning Paths

This whole book serves four readers, and pre-production is the one chapter where all four need the same core skill: putting the plan on paper before the gear comes out. It needs no camera, so no one gets to skip it.

• 📱 Phone-first: §16.1 (the treatment) and §16.3 (the shot list) are the highest-leverage minutes you will spend all book. A phone shoot with a shot list beats a cinema-camera shoot without one. §16.6 turns your phone into a scouting tool.
• 🎥 Creator: §16.2 (the outline script for talking-to-camera and interviews) and §16.3 (a shot list that makes solo shoots fast) are your workhorses. Batch-planning is how creators sustain a schedule.
• 💼 Pro-track: all of it, and it is the heart of your job. The treatment (§16.1) is how you sell the work and align a client; the schedule (§16.4) and budget (§16.5) are how you stay solvent and deliver the day you promised. This is the chapter that separates a videographer from a producer.
• 🎓 Student: the treatment and script (§16.1–16.2) are your writing deliverables; do the full paper trail — treatment, shot list, schedule, budget, recce — for Project 2. The habit you build here is the one every crew will assume you have.

16.1 From idea to plan: the treatment

Say the idea out loud: "a video about the bike-repair shop on the corner." That sentence feels like a plan. It is not. It is a wish — it names a subject and nothing else. It says nothing about what the video is saying, who it is for, how long it is, what it feels like, or what a viewer should think or do when it ends. A wish cannot be shot, scheduled, or budgeted. The first job of pre-production is to convert the wish into a plan, and the tool that does it is the treatment.

A treatment is a short prose description — usually one to three paragraphs — of the video you intend to make, written before any script or shot list, that fixes the video's essential decisions: what it is about, who it is for, how long it runs and where it will live, what it feels like, and what you want the viewer to think, feel, or do at the end. It is the finished video described as if you had already seen it. That last part is the trick: you are not writing about the topic ("this video will cover bike repair"); you are describing the experience the viewer will have, from the first image to the last.

The treatment is the cheapest prototype in all of filmmaking. It costs a paragraph. And because it costs a paragraph, everyone who matters can read it and react before a dollar, an hour, or a favor has been spent. You send it to your subject: "is this the video you're comfortable being in?" You send it to a client: "is this the video you're picturing?" You read it back to yourself a day later and notice, for free, that you have no ending. Every one of those reactions is a problem solved in pre — the one place solving it is nearly free. This is story is the boss (Chapter 1, §1.3) written down: the treatment is where you commit, in words, to what the video is for before you get seduced by shots.

A working treatment answers six questions. Keep them in your head like a checklist:

• The logline — one sentence, the whole video. Not the topic; the story. "A bike shop" is a topic. "The last repair shop on a street of chain stores, and the man who keeps a throwaway world running one wheel at a time" is a story.
• The audience — who is this for? Their attention is the only currency that matters, and a video for everyone is a video for no one.
• The format — length, aspect ratio, and where it lives (a festival, a website, a phone feed). A 3-minute web doc and a 30-second vertical cut are different films from the first decision.
• The tone — the one or two adjectives that will settle a hundred small choices on set. Warm and unhurried leads to soft light, held shots, and quiet sound. Urgent and gritty flips every one of those.
• The "so what" — what does the viewer think, feel, or do at the end? A documentary might want them to feel something (respect, nostalgia); a commercial wants them to do something (click, call, visit).
• The look, roughly — a sentence or two on the visual approach: observational and handheld, or composed and locked-off; interview-led or vérité; color warm or cool.

Here is the treatment for our running example — the bike-shop doc that threads through this whole chapter. Read it as the seed that every later document grows from.

FIGURE 16.1 — Treatment: "Still Rolling" (a 3-minute documentary short)   [constructed teaching example]

  LOGLINE   On a street where every other shop has become a chain, one repair stand keeps the
            neighborhood's bicycles — and a small, stubborn idea about fixing things — alive.

  AUDIENCE  People who like short, human documentaries; locals who know the shop; anyone who
            has ever chosen to repair something instead of replacing it.

  FORMAT    ~3:00, 16:9, for a website and a short-doc showcase; a 9:16 teaser cut later (Ch.23).

  TONE      Warm, unhurried, respectful. Craft, not nostalgia-for-its-own-sake. Light and quiet.

  SO WHAT   The viewer should leave feeling that ordinary, careful work is worth honoring — and
            should want to walk past the shop and look in the window.

  THE VIDEO
  We open before the shop opens: the shutter rolls up at dawn, the sign flickers on, tools laid
  out in the morning light. In voice we meet the owner — not a biography, just the hands and the
  habit of the work. Through a short interview, cut over B-roll of a wheel being trued, we learn
  why they stayed when the street changed. A customer drops off a bike; a small human exchange.
  We end back at the window at closing, the last wheel spinning, the shutter coming down — the
  day, and a quiet argument for fixing what you already have, complete.

Notice what that half-page did. It settled the length, the light (dawn and dusk, soft), the sound (quiet, so an interview is possible), the structure (a day, open-to-close), and the emotional target — all before anyone touched a camera. Every one of those is now a decision the shoot can execute instead of improvise. And notice what it is not: it is not a shot-by-shot plan (that is the shot list, §16.3) and not the exact words (that is the script, §16.2). It is the north star everything else is checked against.

🚪 Threshold Concept: pre-production is the only place the video is cheap to change. A problem is cheapest to fix in the stage where it costs the least to move it. In pre-production, changing the whole video costs rewriting a paragraph. On set, the same change costs the crew's morning and the light you can't get back. In the edit, it can cost the video — you cannot cut to a shot you never took, or un-echo audio recorded in the wrong room. So the professional does the expensive thinking early, when thinking is all it costs. Once you truly believe this, planning stops feeling like a chore and starts feeling like what it is: the highest-leverage hour on the whole job.

⚠️ Common Mistake: writing a summary of the topic instead of a treatment of the experience. A beginner's "treatment" reads like a book report: "This video is about a bike shop. It will show the shop and interview the owner about the history of the business." That describes the subject; it makes zero decisions. A real treatment describes what the viewer sees and feels, in order — it opens on the shutter, it ends at the window, it feels warm and unhurried. If your treatment could be swapped onto a different shop without changing a word, you have written a topic, not a plan. Push until it commits.

🎬 On Set: write the treatment for Project 2. Take the rough documentary idea you seeded back in Chapter 1 and write its treatment now — one to three paragraphs answering all six questions (logline, audience, format, tone, so what, the look). Constraint: it must include a first image and a last image, so the video has a shape. Self-review question: could someone who has never met your subject read this and tell you, correctly, what your video will feel like? If not, it is still a topic. This is the first deliverable of your Production Checkpoint — you are already doing it.

16.2 Scripting: the two-column and the outline script

The treatment describes the whole video in a paragraph. The script describes it in order, moment by moment. A script is the written blueprint of a video's content — what is said and what is seen, laid out in sequence — the document a crew and an editor read to know what happens next. In fiction film the word conjures a specific object, the screenplay, with its slug lines and centered dialogue. But most of the video you will actually make — corporate, commercial, social, and documentary — uses one of two humbler, more useful forms: the two-column (A/V) script and the outline script. Learn these two and you can plan ninety percent of real-world video.

The two-column script — also called the A/V script, for audio/video — is the workhorse of nonfiction. The page is split down the middle. The left column is VIDEO: what we see — the shots, the on-screen text, the graphics. The right column is AUDIO: what we hear — narration, dialogue, music, sound effects. You read it top to bottom, and each row is a beat that pairs a picture with its sound. Its great virtue is that it forces you to plan picture and sound together, in the same glance — which is exactly the discipline Chapter 14 fought for: sound is half the picture. A two-column script physically will not let you forget the audio, because there is a whole column staring at you, empty, until you fill it.

Here is a two-column script for the cold open of the bike-shop doc — the first fifteen seconds, before the interview begins:

FIGURE 16.2 — Two-column (A/V) script: "Still Rolling" cold open   [constructed teaching example]

  VIDEO (what we see)                         | AUDIO (what we hear)
  --------------------------------------------+--------------------------------------------------
  1. Black.                                    | Room tone: a quiet street, one bird. (2 sec)
                                               |
  2. CU — a hand grips the shop's roll-down    | SFX: the metal shutter rattling UP, loud and
     shutter and heaves it up. Morning light   | mechanical. It resolves into street ambience.
     floods in.                                |
                                               |
  3. WIDE — the shop front revealed; the       | MUSIC IN, low and warm (a single guitar).
     "REPAIRS" sign flickers on. The street    | VO (owner): "People ask why I'm still here."
     is empty, the light low and gold.         |
                                               |
  4. Series of DETAILS — tools laid on the     | VO (owner): "Everybody else on this block sells
     bench; a wheel on the stand; grease on    | you a new one. I fix the one you've got."
     a thumb.                                  |
                                               |
  5. MEDIUM — the owner ties on an apron,       | VO (owner): "...Been doing it thirty years.
     unhurried, and picks up a spoke wrench.    | Don't see a reason to stop." (MUSIC swells)
                                               |
  Cut to interview proper (see outline script).| —

Look at what the form did for us. By the time we reach row 5, the audio column has already told us we need clean room tone, a specific shutter sound effect, one warm piece of music, and — critically — that the owner's opening lines are voice-over, which means we can record them at the interview and lay them over the pretty B-roll. That is a plan for the edit, made before the shoot. The script is a paper edit (a preview of Chapter 30's paper edit): a well-built two-column script is the structure of the finished piece, drawn before a frame exists.

But there is a catch, and it defines the second form. In our doc, the owner's lines above are marked "VO (owner)" — but we did not write those words. We cannot. They are a real person; they will say what they say. You cannot script a real person's dialogue and expect it to sound like anything but a hostage reading a ransom note. This is where the outline script comes in: instead of writing the exact words, you outline the structure — the beats you need, the questions you'll ask, the B-roll each beat requires — and let the words arrive from the interview. Documentary, testimonial, vlog, and most interview-driven work live here. You script the shape; the subject supplies the content.

An outline script for our doc's body might read like a nested list: BEAT 1 — "Why he stayed" (question: what kept you on this street when everyone else left?; B-roll: the changing street, the old sign); BEAT 2 — "The craft" (question: walk me through truing a wheel; B-roll: hands, the stand, the spinning rim); BEAT 3 — "The argument" (question: what do people lose when they stop fixing things?; B-roll: a customer, the repair, the handshake). You are not writing his answers. You are guaranteeing that when you sit down to edit, you will have an answer and the pictures to cover it, for every beat the story needs. Question design — how to ask so you get a usable, full-sentence answer instead of a "yeah" — is a craft of its own, and it is the whole of Chapter 19; for now, the outline script just reserves the slot.

There is a third form worth naming so you can rule it out: the screenplay, or master-scene format — the centered-dialogue, scene-heading document of fiction film. It is the right tool when you are staging invented events with actors saying written lines (a narrative short, a scripted ad). It is the wrong tool for almost everything else in this book, which leans nonfiction, so we will not dwell on it — but know it exists and that its logic (describe only what we see and hear, never a character's private thoughts) is worth borrowing.

Which form for which job? A simple rule:

Most documentary shorts — including your Project 2 — use both: a two-column script for any scripted narration or cold open, and an outline script for the interview body. That is not indecision; it is using the right tool for each stretch of the film.

✂️ In the Edit. A script is a letter you write to your future self, the editor. The two-column script's AUDIO column becomes your timeline's structure before you shoot: you already know the narration goes here, the music swells there, the room tone runs underneath. The outline script's beats become your bins and your paper edit — you'll pull the "why he stayed" soundbite, lay the changing-street B-roll over it, and move to the next beat. Every hour spent scripting is an hour subtracted from the edit, and a dozen "what do I do with all this footage?" panics prevented. You are, once again, shooting for the edit — this time before you've even shot.

🔄 Check Your Eye. Before reading on, answer from memory: 1. In a two-column script, what goes in the left column and what goes in the right? 2. Why can't you write an interviewee's lines into a two-column script the way you'd write a narrator's? 3. A client wants a 45-second explainer video with professional narration you'll write and record. Which script form fits, and why?

Check yourself

1. Left = VIDEO (what we see: shots, text, graphics); right = AUDIO (what we hear: narration, dialogue, music, SFX). Reading a row pairs a picture with its sound.
2. A real person will say what they say; scripted lines make them sound stiff and false. You use an outline script — plan the beats and questions, let them supply the words.
3. A two-column (A/V) script — the words are written in advance and spoken by a narrator, so you control both columns and can plan picture and sound together.

16.3 Storyboarding and the shot list

Now we move from words to pictures — from what is said to what is seen, shot by shot. Two documents live here, and they are the most valuable pages a working shooter carries. The first shows what each shot will look like; the second lists every shot you must get.

A storyboard is a sequence of simple drawings — one per shot or key moment — that shows the framing, composition, and action of the video before you shoot it: a comic strip of your film. Each panel is a frame, drawn as a box, with the subject placed inside it and a one-line caption naming the shot. The point is emphatically not to draw well — stick figures and boxes are the professional standard, and directors who can't draw use reference photos or rough shapes. The point is to make the framing decisions on paper, where they are free to change, instead of on set, where they cost the crew's time. A storyboard is composition (Chapter 6), shot size (Chapter 7), and camera movement (Chapter 8) committed to paper before the day.

Here is a storyboard for the doc's opening sequence. Notice that it uses the framing conventions you already know — the subject placed on the thirds, the frame as a deliberate rectangle:

FIGURE 16.3 — Storyboard: the doc's opening sequence (frames left→right = cut order)
  Each box is a 16:9 frame. S = subject; · = a rule-of-thirds intersection; ☀ = window/daylight.

   1  WIDE / establishing          2  MEDIUM                     3  DETAIL (insert)
   +--------------------------+    +--------------------------+    +--------------------------+
   |  ·           ·           |    |  ·           ·           |    |  ·           ·           |
   |       [ S H O P ]        |    |         (S: hands        |    |        ( wheel )         |
   |        | door |          |    |          at the stand)   |    |        spinning          |
   |  ·   __shutter__  ·      |    |  ·           ·           |    |  ·           ·           |
   +--------------------------+    +--------------------------+    +--------------------------+
   "Shutter rolls up at dawn.       "Owner tightens a spoke        "A trued wheel spins;
    Wide: establish the place."      at the repair stand."          light rakes the rim."

   4  INTERVIEW (talking-head)      5  WIDE / reverse (B-roll)
   +--------------------------+    +--------------------------+
   |  ☀           ·           |    |  ·           ·           |
   |         S· (looks L)     |    |    (customer)    S       |
   |        seated            |    |     at the counter       |
   |  ·           ·           |    |  ·           ·           |
   +--------------------------+    +--------------------------+
   "Owner to camera, off-axis        "Reverse: a customer drops
    eyeline; window key camera-L."    off a bike. The shop, alive."

That row of boxes did real work. Placing frame 4 (the interview, subject looking camera-left) next to frame 5 (the reverse, subject on the right) let us check screen direction and the 180-degree line (Chapter 9) before the shoot — if we'd put the customer on the wrong side, the storyboard would have caught it on paper, for free, instead of in the edit where it can't be fixed. That is the whole argument for boarding: it is a continuity check, a composition check, and a coverage check, all done in pencil.

Be honest, though, about when you need a storyboard. It earns its keep on anything with staged action, a camera move that has to hit a mark, a visual effect, or a precise commercial shot — anywhere the picture is planned rather than found. For a straightforward interview-and-B-roll documentary, a full storyboard is often overkill; an outline script plus a good shot list carries the day, and you board only the two or three designed moments (the cold open, a specific reveal). Do not storyboard a talking head. Do storyboard the shots you can only get once.

Which brings us to the single most valuable document a shooter carries. A shot list is an itemized, ordered list of every shot you plan to capture — each with its size, angle, subject, and any notes on movement, lens, audio, or location — used on set as a checklist so that nothing is forgotten. If you make one pre-production document in your life, make this one. It is where "shoot for the edit" (Chapters 1 and 3) stops being a slogan and becomes a line you can cross off: the wide, the medium, the close-up, the cutaway, the insert, the reverse — the coverage (Chapter 7, §7.5) the edit will need, listed so completely that a tired crew at hour four still gets it all.

A shot-list row usually carries: a shot number, the setup or scene it belongs to, the shot size, the angle or move, the subject and action, an audio note, a location, a priority, and any technical note (lens, filter). Here is the shot list for the doc — the document that gets taped to the back of the monitor:

FIGURE 16.4 — Shot list: "Still Rolling" (P = priority: 1 = must-have, 2 = want, 3 = if time)

  #   SETUP        SIZE     MOVE      SUBJECT / ACTION              AUDIO        P   NOTES
  --- ------------ -------- --------- ----------------------------- ------------ --- -----------------
  01  Exterior     WIDE     locked    Shop front; shutter rolls up  SFX shutter  1   Dawn light only!
  02  Exterior     CU       locked    Hand heaves the shutter       SFX shutter  1   Match to 01
  03  Exterior     MED      slow pan  The "REPAIRS" sign flickers   ambience     2   Motivated pan
  04  Interview    MED-CU   locked    Owner, seated, to camera      2-mic (lav+  1   Window key L;
                                       (the whole interview)         shotgun)         off-axis eyeline
  05  Interview    WIDE     locked    2-shot safety of the setup    same feed    2   For cutaways/scale
  06  Bench B-roll CU       locked    Hands truing a wheel          nat sound    1   The hero B-roll
  07  Bench B-roll ECU      locked    Spoke wrench on a nipple      nat sound    1   Insert; texture
  08  Bench B-roll DETAIL   locked    Wheel spins, light on rim     nat sound    2   Backlit if possible
  09  Bench B-roll MED      handheld  Owner reaches for a tool      nat sound    2   Matching action
  10  Wall         DETAIL   slow tilt Wall of tools, worn handles   ambience     2   The years, shown
  11  Counter      WIDE     locked    Customer drops off a bike     nat + dialog 1   Get a release!
  12  Counter      MED      locked    Reverse: owner takes the bike nat + dialog 2   Watch the line (Ch.9)
  13  Exterior     WIDE     locked    Closing: shutter comes down   SFX shutter  1   Dusk; bookends 01
  14  ROOM TONE    —        —         30 sec, shop empty & quiet    room tone    1   ALWAYS (Ch.15)

Read that list the way a shooter does. The priority column is doing quiet, essential work: if the morning runs long, you shoot every "1" before any "2," so you leave with the shots the edit cannot live without — the interview, the hero B-roll of the hands, the bookend shutters, and room tone — and let the "want" shots go. A shot list without priorities is a list that lets you spend the whole morning perfecting shot 3 and never reach shot 11. And notice how the list encodes lessons from all of Part I–III: the interview row remembers the window key (Chapter 11), the off-axis eyeline (a preview of Chapter 19), and the two-mic audio (Chapter 14); the counter rows remember the 180-degree line (Chapter 9) and a release for the customer on camera (a preview of Chapter 38); and the last row, as always, remembers room tone (Chapter 15). The shot list is where every skill you've learned gets converted into a thing you must not forget to do.

💡 Why It Works: the shot list is external memory. On set your working memory is full — you're watching exposure, listening for a plane overhead, keeping the subject relaxed, minding the light as it moves. Human memory buckles under that load, which is exactly when you forget the one cutaway the edit will beg for. The shot list offloads the remembering onto paper. It is not a sign of inexperience to work from a list; it is the opposite. The more experienced you are, the more you have been burned by driving home and realizing you never got the insert — and the more religiously you work the list. Crossing off a shot is not bureaucracy. It is the sound of a problem not happening in the edit.

⚠️ Common Mistake: listing only the "hero" shots and no coverage. The excited beginner's shot list is a highlight reel — the interview, one pretty wide, the cool detail. Then the edit arrives and there is nothing to cut to: no reverse, no matching action, no cutaways to hide the trims in the interview, no second angle. The interview becomes a single unbroken talking head that can't be shortened without a jump cut, which is the definition of a "hostage video" (and the whole reason Chapter 20 exists). The fix is to build the list around the edit: for every setup, ask "what will I cut to?" and list the wide, the medium, the detail, and the reaction — even the ones that feel boring to shoot. Boring on set, gold in the timeline.

🎬 On Set: build the shot list for your Project 2 interview. Take the treatment you wrote in §16.1 and turn its interview-plus-B-roll into a shot list of at least twelve rows, using the columns in FIGURE 16.4 — size, move, subject, audio, priority. Constraint: at least half your rows must be B-roll or coverage (not the interview itself), and every row gets a priority. Self-review question: if you had to leave after getting only your priority-1 shots, would you still have a cuttable film? If not, your priorities are wrong — fix them now, on paper, where it's free.

16.4 Scheduling and the call sheet (preview)

A shot list says what. A schedule says when, and in what order, and how long each will take. A schedule is the plan for how the shoot's available time will be spent — the sequence shots will be captured in and the time allotted to each — turning the shot list into a timed plan for the day. It is the difference between "we have four hours and fourteen shots" (a hope) and "here is exactly how those four hours get spent" (a plan). The schedule is what makes a shoot feel calm, because calm on set is just another word for everyone knowing what happens next.

Scheduling a shoot runs on a handful of principles that surprise beginners, because none of them is "shoot it in the order the video plays."

You do not shoot in story order — you shoot in the most efficient order. The finished doc opens on the shutter and ends on the shutter, but you would never drive to the shop at dawn, leave, and come back at dusk between them. You shoot everything at one location, in one lighting setup, before you move. What makes this possible is continuity (Chapter 9): because you shot the walk-in to match across sizes, the edit can reassemble the pieces in story order no matter what order you captured them in. Shooting out of order is not chaos; it is the payoff of continuity.

Group by setup and location to kill dead time. Every time you move the camera and re-light, you spend minutes you'll never get back — a "company move," even across one room, is expensive. So the schedule clusters: all the bench B-roll together while the light and the stand are set; all the counter shots together; the exterior at the top and tail. You are minimizing the number of times you tear down and rebuild.

Schedule around what you cannot control. Some things bend to your will and some don't. The owner's availability, the soft dawn light (Chapter 13), the quiet hour before the shop opens when you can actually record clean dialogue (Chapter 15), the shop's real opening time when customers arrive — these are fixed points, and the schedule is built around them. You put the interview in the quiet hour because you can't un-noise a busy shop in the edit. You put the exterior at the shutter-up because dawn light lasts twenty minutes and then it's gone. Fix it in pre.

Build in buffer, because everything takes longer than you think. The single most reliable fact about shoot days is that they run long. The interview subject is nervous and needs ten minutes to warm up; the autofocus hunts; a truck idles outside for the perfect take. A schedule with no slack is a schedule that fails at 9:15 and stays failed all day. Pad every block, and keep a contingency cushion at the end. A useful discipline: estimate honestly, then add a third.

Front-load the must-haves. Shoot your priority-1 shots while everyone is fresh and time is still abundant. Energy and time both drain across a shoot day; the worst place for your most important shot is the end of the schedule, when the light is going and everyone is tired. Get the film in the can early; spend the back half on the "wants."

Here is the shot list from §16.3, turned into a half-day schedule:

FIGURE 16.5 — Shoot-day schedule: "Still Rolling" (a half-day, one location, crew of two)

  TIME    BLOCK                         SHOTS        NOTES
  ------- ----------------------------- ------------ ------------------------------------------
  07:00   Arrive, unload, set up        —            Beat the light; scout done in advance
  07:15   EXTERIOR — dawn light         01, 02, 03   Shutter up; golden low light (~20 min only!)
  07:45   INTERVIEW — quiet hour        04, 05       Shop still closed = clean audio; window key
  08:45   BENCH B-ROLL                  06, 07, 08,  Hero shots of the hands; light already set
                                        09
  09:30   BUFFER / coffee / review      —            Watch back the interview; catch any gaps
  09:45   WALL + shop details           10           While the owner opens up
  10:00   COUNTER — shop open           11, 12       Real customer; get the release signed
  10:45   ROOM TONE                     14           30 sec, everyone silent
  10:55   Grab any missed "2/3" shots   (as time)    Work the priority list down
  17:30   RETURN — dusk                 13           Closing shutter; bookends the open
  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Note: the day is bookended by light (dawn 01-03, dusk 13) with the controllable interior work
  packed into the quiet morning. Story order on screen ≠ shooting order on the day.

That single page is what turns fourteen scattered shots into a morning that ends on time. Note the two returns to the exterior for dawn and dusk light — the only shots worth breaking the "group by location" rule for, because light this good can't be faked and can't be rushed.

A schedule is the private document; its public face is the call sheet — the one-page sheet handed to everyone on the production that tells them where to be, when, what's being shot, who to call, and the day's vital details (sunrise and sunset, weather, nearest hospital, the plan). We will not define it fully here, because the call sheet is the next chapters' territory — it is only previewed in this section's title.

🔗 Connection. The call sheet — how a schedule becomes a set of instructions everyone on the crew can follow — is built in detail in Chapter 18 (§18.2, "The call sheet and the shoot-day timeline"), alongside crew roles and set etiquette. For now, know that your schedule is the raw material the call sheet is made from, and that even a solo shoot benefits from writing one: a call sheet addressed to a crew of one is still a promise you make to yourself about how the day will go. Templates for both live in Appendix I.

⚠️ Common Mistake: scheduling in story order, with no buffer, ignoring the light. Three beginner scheduling errors travel together. First, shooting in the order the video plays — which sends you back and forth across locations and lighting setups, burning the day in company moves. Second, packing the schedule with zero slack, so the first ten-minute overrun cascades into a blown afternoon. Third, ignoring the clock the sun keeps — scheduling the golden-hour exterior for whenever you happen to get to it, and arriving to find flat noon light or full dark. The fix is the whole of this section: shoot in efficient order, pad every block, and build the day around the fixed points of light, quiet, and people.

🔄 Check Your Eye. Quick retrieval: 1. Why don't you shoot in the same order the finished video plays? 2. What makes it safe to shoot out of order — which earlier chapter's skill? 3. Name two "fixed points" a shoot schedule must be built around, and why each can't be fixed later in the edit.

Check yourself

1. Efficiency — you group by location and lighting setup to avoid costly "company moves," and front-load the must-have shots while time and energy are fresh.
2. Continuity (Chapter 9): because you shoot matching action and screen direction, the edit can reassemble out-of-order footage into story order.
3. Any two of: the good light (dawn/golden hour, Chapter 13 — it lasts minutes and can't be re-created); the quiet window for clean audio (Chapter 15 — you can't un-noise a room in post); talent/location availability (they're only there when they're there). Each is a real-world constraint the edit is powerless to undo.

16.5 Budgeting: money, time, and favors

Every shoot has a budget, even the ones with no money — because a budget is the plan for the resources a production will consume, listing what the project needs and what each line will cost. And "cost" is denominated in three currencies, not one: money, time, and favors. The student and the solo creator often have almost no money but real time and a small economy of goodwill — a friend with a light, an uncle's van, a shop owner who'll let you film for free. Naming all three currencies is what keeps a "free" shoot honest, because a shoot that costs no money can still cost a whole Saturday and three favors you'll have to repay.

A budget's job is to make the invisible costs visible before they surprise you. The categories are always roughly the same, whether the number in the money column is four figures or zero:

• Pre-production — your planning time; a location scout; permits or permissions.
• Crew and talent — even if the "crew" is you and a friend, their time is a real cost, and a favor owed.
• Gear — camera, audio, light, support. Own it, rent it, or borrow it — three very different lines.
• Location — a fee, or a favor, or a permit; and the cost of access (parking, power, load-in).
• Art, props, wardrobe — usually small for documentary, real for narrative and commercial.
• Transport and logistics — getting people and gear there and back.
• Food — not optional. If anyone gives you their day, you feed them. This line is where beginners' goodwill quietly dies.
• Post-production — a music license (Chapter 38), storage and backup drives, your editing time.
• Contingency — 10 to 20 percent held back for the thing that breaks. It always breaks.
• Your own time — the most-forgotten line of all. "Free" work that eats every weekend is not free; it is unpaid, and confusing the two is how creators burn out.

Here is the budget for the doc, kept in all three currencies:

FIGURE 16.6 — Budget skeleton: "Still Rolling" (a no/low-budget documentary short)

  LINE ITEM              MONEY ($)   TIME            FAVOR / DIY PATH
  ---------------------- ----------- --------------- ------------------------------------------
  Pre-production         0           ~3 hrs          Treatment, shot list, schedule, recce (you)
  Location               0           —               Owner's permission (a favor — repay it)
  Crew (you + 1)         0           2 × half-day    A friend booms; you owe them a shoot
  Talent (the owner)     0           1 hr of theirs  A favor — send them the finished film
  Camera + lens          0           —               Phone you own (Ch.1) — or borrow a body
  Audio (lav + shotgun)  0–150       —               Borrow, or a modest kit that pays off all book
  Light                  0           —               Window light, dawn (Ch.13) — bought nothing
  Support (tripod)       0–30        —               Cheap tripod or brace it (Ch.8)
  Transport              ~10         30 min          Bus/bike/car to the shop
  Food                   ~25         —               Coffee + lunch for you and your friend
  Music license          0–30        —               Free/CC-licensed track, or a paid library (Ch.38)
  Storage / backup       ~0–60       —               A drive you own; back up (3-2-1, Ch.37)
  Contingency (~15%)     ~20         buffer block     Hold it back for the thing that breaks
  ---------------------- ----------- --------------- ------------------------------------------
  TOTAL                  ~$90–355    ~1.5 days        + 3 favors owed (location, boom, subject)

Two things about that table teach the whole discipline. First, the money column can read zero on most lines and the film still gets made — because the cost moved into the other two columns. That is not a trick; it is how nearly all first films get made, and there is no shame in it. Second, the favors column is a ledger of debts. Favors are loans, not gifts. The etiquette is simple and non-negotiable: feed the people who help you, credit them, send the subject the finished film, and return the favor when they call. Your reputation is the real budget, and it is the only one that compounds. Burn goodwill on one shoot and the next one costs money you don't have.

🎒 Gear Note: rent, borrow, or buy — a decision, not a reflex. The beginner's instinct is to buy the gear a shoot needs. Usually that's the wrong currency. The rule of thumb: buy only what you use on nearly every job (a support, a basic mic, a card or two); rent the specialty item you need for this one shoot (a long lens, a gimbal, a second body); borrow the occasional thing from a friend or a maker-space, and pay it back in kind. A shoot is not a reason to acquire equipment; it is a reason to get access to equipment for a day or two. And the phone-and-window path (Chapter 1) is always on the table: the cheapest line item is the shot you already know how to get with what you own.

🔗 Connection. When the budget stops being your Saturday and starts being a client's money, it becomes a price — and pricing, contracts, the statement of work, licensing, and the model and property releases that keep you legal are the subject of Chapter 38 (The Business of Video). The skeleton here is the seed of a real quote: add your day rate, mark up the rentals, and a personal budget becomes a professional bid. Note the two lines above that already point at Chapter 38 — the music license and the customer's release.

16.6 Location scouting and the recce

There is one pre-production step that beginners skip and professionals never do: visiting the location before the shoot. In crew slang this is the recce (from reconnaissance) — a location scout, the trip you make to the place you'll film before the day you film there. Skip it and you will discover, at the worst possible moment, that the room echoes like a swimming pool, that the pretty window faces a brick wall, that there is nowhere to plug in, that the shop sits under a flight path, or that the space you pictured is half the size you imagined. Every one of those is a shoot-wrecker, and every one is invisible until you stand in the room — or trivially catchable if you do.

A good recce checks five domains. Walk them in order, on your phone, taking notes and reference photos as you go:

• Picture. What does it actually look like? Are the backgrounds right for the story — the wall of worn tools behind the owner, not a fire exit? Is there room to place the camera where the shot wants it, and to get the wide and the reverse? Photograph every angle you might use. The place has to earn its way into the treatment's tone.
• Sound. How does it sound? This is the single most-skipped and most-punishing check. Stand still and listen: is there echo (a hard, bare room) that will make dialogue hollow? An HVAC unit, a hum, a fridge, traffic, a school across the street, neighbors? Record ten seconds on your phone and play it back on headphones — the mic hears what your distracted ear filters out. You cannot un-echo a room in the edit (Chapter 15), so you either fix it now or find another room.
• Light. Where does the light come from at the time you'll shoot, and can you control it? Which way do the windows face — soft north light, or hard direct sun at ten a.m.? Are there blinds to shape it (Chapter 13)? Is there simply enough of it? Light changes hour to hour, which is why the next rule matters so much.
• Power and logistics. The unglamorous domain that sinks shoots: are there outlets, and where? Where do you park and load in? Stairs or elevator? Is there a restroom, a place for people to wait, somewhere to set down gear and eat? A shoot is a small event, and events need infrastructure.
• Permission and people. Who owns or controls this space, and do you have permission — or need a permit? When is it actually available and empty? Who else will be there? A public café at eleven a.m. is a shoot with strangers in every shot, each of whom may need a release (Chapter 38) and all of whom add noise. Permission is cheaper to get before the day than to beg for during it.

The golden rule of scouting: recce at the same time of day you'll shoot. A room that is silent and golden at seven a.m. is a loud, flat, sun-blasted box at noon, and the two visits would tell you opposite things. Your phone is the entire scouting kit — a camera for reference stills and a panorama, a voice memo for the room's sound, a compass app to see which way the windows face, and a notes app for the checklist. Turn the recce's findings straight into the plan: here is the interview corner of the bike shop, scouted and mapped, using the diagram symbols you've seen since Part III:

FIGURE 16.7 — Recce map: the interview corner, "Still Rolling" (top-down view)   [constructed teaching example]

              [ FRONT WINDOW ] ☀  soft morning light (faces east — great at 8 a.m.)
                     |
                     ▼  (window is the motivated KEY; no light bought)
      wall of tools ▣ (natural separation behind subject's shoulder)
                   ( S ) ──────► off-axis eyeline to interviewer, just beside the lens
                    ↑
                    ○  white foamcore bounce, camera-right, lifts the shadow side ~1.5 stops
                    |
                  ((•  shotgun on a stand, just out of top of frame  + lav on subject (2-mic safety)
                    |
                 [ CAM ]  ~50mm-equiv, subject on the right third, window key camera-left

  RECCE NOTES: quiet before 9 a.m. (opens at 9 — SHOOT THE INTERVIEW FIRST). Fridge hum from the
  back room — unplug it for takes. One outlet by the door; bring an extension. Parking out front.
  Owner OK with filming; customers after 9 will need a release. Dusk light too weak indoors — a.m. only.

That one map is the recce turned into a shootable plan: it fixed the light (window key, east-facing, morning), the sound (quiet before nine, kill the fridge), the framing (subject on the third, off-axis eyeline, the tool wall for separation), the audio safety (two mics — Chapter 14), the logistics (one outlet, bring an extension, parking), and the permissions (owner yes, customers need releases). Nothing on that map is expensive. All of it is invisible until someone stands in the room and looks — which is the entire reason the recce exists.

♿ Accessibility & Inclusion. Scout for access, not just for picture. Can everyone you need — a subject who uses a wheelchair, a crew member with a bad knee, a participant with a stroller — actually get in and move around? Note step-free entrances, the width of doorways, and where a person can sit and rest. The same trip that checks your sightlines should check your ramps. And plan consent into the location: at any place where the public appears in frame, you need a way to get releases (Chapter 38) and to respect people who don't want to be filmed. Accessibility and consent are not add-ons you bolt on later; like everything in this chapter, they are cheapest to solve in pre — on the scout, before the day.

🔄 Check Your Eye. Last retrieval for this chapter: 1. Name the five domains a recce checks. 2. Why must you scout at the same time of day you'll shoot? 3. Which recce domain do beginners skip most, and what edit-stage disaster does skipping it cause?

Check yourself

1. Picture, sound, light, power/logistics, and permission/people.
2. Because light and sound change hour to hour — a room that's golden and quiet at dawn can be flat, sun-blasted, and loud by noon; a scout at the wrong time gives you the opposite of the truth.
3. Sound. Beginners photograph the pretty backgrounds and never listen — then record an interview in an echoey, humming room and discover in the edit that the dialogue is hollow and unfixable. You can't un-echo a room in post (Chapter 15).

Production Checkpoint

Your task: pre-produce your Project 2 documentary short — write a one-paragraph treatment, a shot list, and a simple schedule. This is the moment your three-minute documentary stops being an idea and becomes a production. You will not shoot anything yet; you will build the plan that the rest of Part IV executes.

Three deliverables:

1. The treatment (§16.1) — one to three paragraphs, answering the six questions (logline, audience, format, tone, so what, the look), with a first image and a last image so the film has a shape. If you did the §16.1 🎬 On Set, you already have this — refine it.
2. The shot list (§16.3) — at least twelve rows in the FIGURE 16.4 format (size, move, subject, audio, priority). At least half the rows must be B-roll or coverage, and every row gets a priority so a short day still yields a cuttable film.
3. A simple schedule (§16.4) — turn the shot list into a timed plan for your shoot day: efficient order (grouped by setup and location), built around your fixed points (the light of Chapter 13, the quiet of Chapter 15, your subject's availability), with buffer in it.

Why this matters: this is the purest possible demonstration of the chapter — and of the whole book's fifth throughline. Every problem you solve on these three pages is a problem that will not ambush you on the shoot day or, worse, in the edit three weeks later. You are about to interview a real person (Chapter 19) and gather the B-roll that makes the cut work (Chapter 20); a documentary lives or dies on whether that footage fits together, and whether it fits together is decided here, in pre. Fix it in pre, not in post. Keep these three documents — they are the working papers you will shoot from, and Project 2 is now underway.

Summary

Pre-production is the cheapest place to solve a problem, because you are only spending thought. This chapter's job was to give you the documents that convert an idea into a calm, executable shoot.

The pre-production document set — what each is and when you need it:

Which script form: words written in advance and spoken by you/a narrator → two-column; words from a real person → outline; invented lines performed by actors → screenplay. Most docs use two-column and outline.

Scheduling, in five rules: shoot in efficient order (not story order); group by setup and location; build the day around fixed points (light, quiet, people); pad every block with buffer; front-load the must-haves. Continuity (Chapter 9) is what makes out-of-order shooting safe.

Budget's three currencies: money, time, favors. Favors are loans — feed people, credit them, repay them; reputation is the real budget. Never forget the food line, the contingency (10–20%), or your own time. Buy what you use daily, rent the specialty item, borrow the occasional.

The recce's five domains: picture, sound, light, power/logistics, permission/people. Scout at the shoot's time of day; your phone is the whole kit. Sound is the most-skipped, most-punishing check.

The throughline: fix it in pre, not in post. Every document above is a place to solve a problem while it still costs a sentence instead of a shoot day or a whole video.

Spaced Review

Bringing back two earlier chapters that this one leans on hard — the shot grammar of Chapter 7 and the directing of Chapter 10.

1. (Ch.7) Your shot list must build coverage so the edit can cut. Name the three basic shot sizes and, for the doc's interview, say what job each would do in the edit.
2. (Ch.7) What is the 180-degree line, and how did the storyboard in FIGURE 16.3 let you check it before the shoot rather than discover a broken cut after it?
3. (Ch.10) Directing a real person (your documentary subject) is different from directing an actor. Name two things from Chapter 10 you'd plan into your pre-production to get a relaxed, truthful performance from a nervous first-timer.
4. (Ch.10) What is blocking, and why does deciding it in pre-production (on the recce map, say) make the shoot day calmer?
5. (Ch.7 + Ch.10) Your schedule front-loads the interview into the quiet morning hour. Give one performance reason (Ch.10) and one coverage reason (Ch.7) that this is the right call.

What's Next

You now have a plan — a treatment, a script, a shot list, a schedule, a budget, a scouted location. But a plan can be thorough and still be boring: a perfectly organized shoot of a video no one wants to watch. The missing ingredient is the one your treatment's logline only gestured at — story. In Chapter 17 we go deep on narrative and structure: why even a testimonial is a story, what a three-act shape does for a three-minute documentary, how the first ten seconds earn the next three minutes, and how to find the arc of your Project 2 before you shoot a frame of it. You have learned to plan the shoot. Now we make sure the thing you're planning is worth a stranger's time.