Pre-production is an area that we drastically have to improve upon, during our preparation meetings for the pilot we focused too much on the actual production stage of the pilot as opposed to the pre-production stage. Time that could have been spent doing location recces, casting, script revision and production scheduling was instead left on the wayside, as we rushed to hire equipment and planned everything in three days in an attempt to get filming done during class in order maximise our mid-semester break relaxation.

I feel like going forward we need to be really on top of organising everything. We need to have a location booked in far in advance, so that we can rehearse with the actors and organise shoot documents that work around the multiple locations that we need. This also comes down to waiting for the writers to finish their scripts and communicating with us the amount of locations they have and things that we may need to know. This will allow us to location scout at least two weeks in advance of our shoot dates, so we don’t end up in the same position we were in for the pilot.

I also really want to focus on dressing those locations as that’s something we completely didn’t think to do for our pilot and it really shows in the footage. The art direction and production design is incredibly important for adding atmosphere and realism to a series. It’s important that we capture the office environment, especially if we are not able to get an ideal location and this is something I’m going to urge our team to work on. Hopefully between the large group we have we’ll be able to source props and costumes in order to design and bring together the perfect set.

Casting is also an aspect of pre-production that is extremely important to get right, and while the acting during our pilot was fantastic and I personally would love to see Monty return as the boss character, I think Liz and Dalv need to be recast to suit the character traits the writers have given us in their bible. For me finding the right actors is paramount because bad acting could completely destroy our web series and also finding people who are dedicated despite it being an unpaid role. We’re going to have a lot more time to find actors as we’re posting an ad on StarNow and holding auditions a few weeks in advance of filming as well as sharing the ad with any friends who may be interested in acting. I’m optimistic that we’re going to be much more organised and the finished product will reflect said organisation.