Part IV — Pre-Production and the Shoot
You now have the skills of a shooter: you can operate a camera, compose a frame, light a face, and record clean sound. Part IV puts those skills into a real production — a shoot with a plan, a story, a crew (even if the crew is just you), an interview, and the coverage that makes an edit possible.
This is where the book's least glamorous and most powerful throughline pays off: fix it in pre, not in post. The calm, productive shoots are the well-planned ones, every time.
Five chapters take you from idea to a full set of footage:
- Chapter 16 — Pre-Production. Scripts, storyboards, shot lists, schedules, and budgets — the cheap planning that prevents expensive chaos.
- Chapter 17 — Story and Structure. Narrative, arc, and the hook — because even a testimonial is a story, and structure is what holds a viewer.
- Chapter 18 — On Set. Crew roles, call sheets, and set etiquette — how a shoot actually runs, whether it's a team of twenty or a team of one.
- Chapter 19 — The Interview. Framing, lighting, audio, and question design — the backbone of nonfiction video, and how to get answers worth cutting.
- Chapter 20 — B-Roll and Coverage. The footage that makes edits work; without it, an interview is a hostage video.
Part IV begins Project 2, your 3-minute documentary short. You will plan it (Ch.16–18), shoot its interview (Ch.19), and gather its B-roll (Ch.20) — leaving you, by the end of the part, with all the raw material of a real documentary, waiting for the edit.
Everything here assumes and applies Parts I–III: you cannot shoot a good interview without exposure, framing, light, and sound. That is the design of the book — each part stands on the ones before it. When you finish Part IV, you will have run a genuine production from plan to wrap. Part V then takes those production skills into the specific genres and formats you will actually be hired to make.