With the benefit of hindsight, I feel that shot listing was left later than it should have been in our group. We spent a fair bit of our time in advance of the shoot refining the script, organising shoot dates and preparing equipment, all of which were important, but the shot listing did end up being put on the back burner for a while. It wasn’t until the week of the shoot that we had a finished shot list.

The actual process of creating the shot list ended up being a kind of two sessions affair. First, Jenny and I went through the entire script and made notes about which shots we thought should be used for each piece of dialogue/action, which took a couple of hours. Then, Jenny and Dylan went through the notes the following day and wrote all the shots into a spread sheet, taking into account camera positioning, props etc. As the director, I would have liked to have been there for this second process, just to ensure that all my desired shots were being included in the shot list. Having said that, Dylan and Jenny did a really god job.

The only reason I’m reflecting that we would have benefited from doing the shot list earlier, is because it would have given us more time to get our shooting schedule together. We ended up doing much of the shooting schedule on the day of the shoot, which was not ideal. For future projects I’ll try to ensure that the shot list is finished well in advance of the shoot date, to allow for more time to complete the shooting schedule.