What We Look for Before the Cameras Come Out.

Sometimes the best thing you can do when you arrive at a shoot is not immediately pull the camera out, because there is a lot you can learn about a place in the first few minutes if you actually look around instead of immediately deciding what the footage is supposed to be.

I want to know where people naturally gather, where the light actually looks good, who everyone seems to go to when something needs to happen, what part of the process happens so often that the people working there have stopped noticing it and what would be interesting to someone seeing this business for the first time.

That last part is usually where the best stuff is.

People become blind to their own businesses because they live inside them every day, so the chef does not think the way they finish a plate is interesting anymore, the founder has told the same story so many times they think everyone already knows it and the team has repeated the same process for years without realizing that somebody outside the company might actually want to see how it works.

That is why I like shot lists, but I do not want to be married to them.

If I walk into a shoot thinking only about checking boxes, it becomes very easy to miss the thing happening right in front of me because I am too busy trying to get “wide shot of team working.”

A shot list should keep us organized, not make us blind.

The better question is usually, what is happening here that tells me something about this business?

Sometimes it is exactly what we planned.

Sometimes it is a handwritten note taped beside a computer that says more than the entire About page.