Reply To: How Do You Build Your Director’s Shot List?

[Don]

Christine’s process and materials are perfect. These surely give her a deep understanding of the scenes. I recommend, somewhat glibly, that a director seldom open that binder of preproduction materials and rely more on the blocking rehearsals. While preparing all of these materials, the Director is a lone, capricious, omniscient god with a pencil or an iPad. However, on the day, many other artists are involved– principally the actors. Plus, there’s physics and biology: the earth turns, lunch has its soporific effect, etc. It’s much better to have your plans guide the much better movie that you’ll make by noticing reality than to try to pound reality to make an inferior copy of your plan. Practically, this means getting the most essential shots or aspects that tell the emotional story from your plan, and working out the actual flow and practicalities with your collaborators.