What Do You Actually Need From Me Before the Shoot?

You do not need to arrive at the first production call carrying a thirty seven page creative deck, six moodboards and a shot list down to the exact millisecond, and honestly, unless you already have those things for a reason, please do not panic and make them because you think that is what a production company expects.

You can come to us with a very developed idea.

You can also come to us with, “We need people to finally understand what we do.”

Both are workable.

What helps most is knowing a few basic things.

Before we talk about cameras, lenses, locations or whether something should feel “cinematic,” I want to understand the problem.

Are you launching something? Trying to explain a service people never quite understand? Building trust with a new audience? Creating enough content for the next quarter? Training employees? Promoting an event?

“Cinematic” tells me what you might want something to look like. It does not tell me why we are making it, and almost everybody wants cinematic until we ask what cinematic actually means, which can range anywhere from “nice lighting” to “I saw a Nike commercial once.”

The clearer the goal is, the better decisions we can make about everything else.

I also need to know who needs to care, because the same company can communicate completely differently depending on whether we are speaking to customers, employees, investors, another business or people who have never heard of the brand before.

And please tell us where the work needs to live before we shoot.

If the hero piece is for the website but marketing also needs Instagram, LinkedIn, paid ads and a giant screen at an event, that changes the way we frame, cover and plan the production.

This is how you avoid the post production conversation where somebody says, “Can we make this vertical?” and everyone slowly looks at the beautifully composed horizontal wide shot.

The camera cannot travel back in time.

Unfortunately.

A good first conversation really only needs a few things: what you are trying to accomplish, who it is for, where it needs to live, when you need it and anything you already know.

We can figure out the cameras later.

That is the easy part.