Be Brave. Shoot Less

There's a particular feeling I get sometimes when I sit down in an edit suite. There are two timelines open, a transcript on the screen beside them, an hour and a half of interview on one side, a page of b-roll bins on the other, and the brief sitting open in another window.

You start cross referencing the transcript against what the film is supposed to be and somewhere in the first twenty minutes a quiet, sinking realisation sets in. These two things are describing completely different films.

The footage is fine, the interview happened, but the story that was supposed to be there isn't, and no amount of time bashing at the timeline is going to find it.

And now I have to go back to the commissioner and try to convince them that what we probably need is a voiceover to bridge the gaps, which is a conversation nobody particularly wants to have, because what it really means is that we're circling squares to fit a brief the shoot never quite answered.

I've had that feeling more than once. It's a specific kind of frustration because by the time you're in the edit suite the shoot is done, the contributor has gone home, the location is wrapped, and whatever wasn't captured on the day stays uncaptured.

You work with what you've got, you do your best, and the film comes out fine. Just fine. Which is its own kind of disappointment.

The issue, almost every time, is that nobody defined the story precisely enough before anyone picked up a camera, and no amount of footage fixes that.

Here's a pattern I keep seeing, and it usually goes something like this.

A company has something they want to say, someone in-house does the groundwork, identifies the contributors, sorts the dates, writes down a few interview questions, organises some b-roll scenes to tie it together and brings in a filmmaker to capture it.

Everyone has done their job and the building blocks are all there, and yet when the edit comes back the film doesn't quite land and nobody can put their finger on why.

Nobody was responsible for the story architecture. That's why.

I always think making a film is a bit like building a house, and the approach I've just described is a bit like going out and buying bricks, windows and a front door, handing them to a builder and expecting a home at the end of it. The builder does their best with what they've got, but you both stand back when it's done and scratch your heads because it's not what either of you had in mind.

The raw materials were there. What was missing was the architect, the person whose job is to hold the picture of the finished thing before a single brick gets laid.

Two projects come to mind that illustrate this. Both made by genuinely talented filmmakers, the kind of people who could make something look beautiful. Both coming from a background in shorter social content, and somewhere along the way an assumption had been made that what works on Instagram will scale up to something longer, and it never quite does, for reasons that are almost entirely down to story architecture.

The first was a short documentary built around a single contributor. Planning had been done, questions written, dates confirmed but the overarching question driving the film was too broad to answer in ten minutes, and nobody had caught that before the shoot.

The interview ran for nearly two hours. It was beautifully filmed, but the questions wandered, drifting into backgrounds and biography that had no place in the final cut.

The contributor was warm and generous but she was never guided toward the specific story the film needed her to tell, because that story hadn't been precisely defined before anyone walked into the room with her.

By the time I sat down to edit I had maybe four minutes of usable material from two hours of footage, and the edit took four times longer than it needed to. The finished film still felt like it was searching for something.

The second was an athlete film. The concept had been sold to the client and that's more or less where the thinking stopped.

On the shoot the team filmed what interested them on the day, which is a natural instinct but a very difficult thing to edit from.

The footage looked great, but there were no story blocks, no moments that answered the question the film was supposed to be asking, largely because that question had never been written down anywhere. The interview was broad, nobody dug, nobody steered, and the edit showed every bit of that. The film worked visually but as a story it went nowhere.

In both cases the problem had nothing to do with effort or talent or equipment, and everything to do with the fact that nobody had defined the architecture before anyone showed up with a camera.

So what does that actually look like when you get it right?

The first thing I'll do when I come onto a project early enough is help stress test the story, because most of the time the story a client wants to tell is too broad for the film they want to make, and that's not a criticism, it's just what happens when you're close to your subject.

"We want to tell this person's entire journey" is a natural place to start but it's a subject, not a film.

What you need is a premise, one focused question that the whole film is trying to answer, specific enough that every scene, every interview answer, every piece of b-roll can be measured against it and either earns its place or doesn't.

Once you have that premise, you have to go and test it against the person you're about to put in front of a camera, because one of the most common mistakes I see is a story that has been thought about carefully but never actually checked.

You've built an idea of who this contributor is, how they think, what they're going to say, and you turn up on the day and none of it lands the way you expected.

They don't frame things the way you assumed, their experience of the story is different to the one you'd written in your head, and suddenly the questions you've prepared are aimed at a version of them that doesn't exist.

I always speak to contributors before a shoot, even briefly, because if you guess at someone's story or their feeling about an experience, you're often wrong, and finding that out in the edit suite rather than in a twenty minute phone call beforehand is an expensive way to learn it.

Once you have that, interview planning becomes a different exercise entirely. No interview for a short film should run much longer than an hour at most, and if you've done the thinking in advance you already know what you're going in to get and an hour is usually more than enough to get it. Questions become targeted rather than exploratory, built around drawing out the specific story you need from this specific person rather than hoping it surfaces somewhere in the general conversation.

B-roll is now deliberate rather than hopeful, built around the specific visual moments your edit is going to need rather than a general sweep of the location.

You know which moments you need to land which points in the story, so you go and get those rather than coming back with hours of beautiful but directionless footage and trying to construct something coherent from it later.

Do all of that and something shifts on a shoot.

The filmmaker and the client are looking at the same picture, every decision on the day is faster and more confident, the edit is leaner, and the film actually says what it was supposed to say.

And perhaps most usefully, you don't end up paying for a four day edit when two days should have been plenty.

The thinking that happens before the camera rolls is the most valuable part of the process, and it's nearly always the part that gets skipped, not out of laziness but because most people commissioning films don't know it needs to happen, and most people being hired to shoot them aren't being asked to provide it.

So before the next shoot, the question worth sitting with isn't how much you can get on the day but what you're actually trying to answer, and whether everything you're planning genuinely serves that.

Be specific. Be brave. Stop hoping the edit will save you, because it won't. Note from Author

If any of this sounds familiar, whether you're planning a film and not quite sure where to start, or you've been through an edit that felt harder than it should have, this is exactly the kind of work I do.

I come in early, help find and shape the story, and make sure that by the time anyone picks up a camera, we're all looking at the same picture. If that sounds useful, you can find me at www.hughfarrow.com.