Plans, Plots and Schemes

So the money is in place, everyone is on the same page creatively, the song is a jam and you’ve got the go-ahead. Now you have to take your amorphous video concept and make a plan that you can practically execute.

The first step is to open an empty text document and put it alongside your rough synopsis. Then, second by second, you listen to the song and write down what will be happening in each part. Literally. Looks like this:

<0:00 - 0:07 Guy in car with CD
0:08 - 0:12 Pinks in studio
0:12 - 0:15 Guy in car jamming out
0:15 - 0:17 Pinks on the streets
0:17 - 0:21 Pinks at photoshoot
0:22 - 0:26 Pinks in studio

It’s tedious, it’s kind of weird, it’s totally going to make or break your video.

If you were making a short film, you would have a script with scene numbers and page numbers. The script is the plan for the film. This document you are creating is like the script for the video, but it’s a little bit less than that (the song contains the dialogue) and a little bit more (when its time to edit, this will be super handy, as I will explain when the time comes). So eventually you have every second of the script planned out. Now it’s time to process that into a shot list. This is, unfortunately, a multiple-step process.

The first step is to write down all the lyrics in the song. You should know them since they have implications on what you’re doing, anyways, but part of this exercise is to ensure that you cover all the lines that you need to cover.

So for this video I distilled my outline into an outline by location. It looks like this:

So let’s go through this horizontally. From right to left like the Chinese do. There’s the lyrics that are covered by that chunk of song. There’s a spot for notes, usually handwritten when I’m on set. There’s a description of what is happening visually in that bit of the song (NOT what the shot is, because there might be more than one). Then there’s the time in the song. Since this list organizes by location, this is not contiguous from grab to grab.

What’s a grab? I called it that for lack of a better term. The idea is that the shot list will reference this outline in a similar way to how the shotlist in a short film would reference a script. The difference is that in a music video you can change locations and time tracks dozens of times a minute, so scene numbers can be confusing and feel inapprorpiate. I employ three number systems. Grabs, Locations and Shots.

Here’s my shot list:

So there’s a compact shot number, which is made up of a location number and the individual shot, which I have lettered. Then in the description column I annotate the part(s) of the outline this is covering and describe the shot technically. Sometimes I will format this sheet with a little more space on each line so that I can draw a little thumbnail storyboard for each shot.

Once you have these two documents it’s time to schedule your shoot. I do this with an excel spreadsheet that I inherited from a short film I directed. My writer/producer pal Ben Joseph made it, and it’s a critical tool I use on every shoot I do. I’m sharing the one I used for the music video I just shot for your downloading pleasure.

Basically this sheet just automates the shot timing. You fill in your shot numbers and how long you are scheduling them for, and it calculates when you need to start the next shot using math. Smart huh?

The first film I made after high school was a 30 minute drama. It probably had a dozen locations, a hundred shots. We shot for seven days. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and we did not have a shot list. I remain amazed that we have anything to show for that, much less a somewhat cohesive narrative (no matter how embarrassing it is to me now). Please make a schedule. On this most recent shoot I realized how necessary it is not only to schedule your shoots, but also to have an AD (assistant director) on set to keep you on schedule and make sure you’re getting your shots. I didn’t do that this time and nearly forgot a critical shot. The actor had to remind me to get it. I was ashamed, and it didn’t make me look very good in front of the rapper’s manager. It didn’t end up being a problem, but don’t make the mistake I did. Have someone on set whose only job it is to make sure the schedule is respected.

One other thing I want to call attention to is the fact that the shoot in this spreadsheet is scheduled for short hours. 10:00-4:50 the first day, 9:00 to 5:10 the second. This video was pretty low budget, so I couldn’t pay my crew the normal day rates they can get. Basically everyone was doing us a favor. I firmly believe in returning that favor by feeding my crew well and by not working them like dogs. I worked on a shitty AOL commercial a few months ago for $125/day and they had us on set for 14-16 hours both days of the shoot. The producers didn’t pay me for any overtime, and they only provided one meal each day. That’s illegal, but it’s also just bad business. I will never work for them again, and I will never let that producer near anything I direct. I never want anyone to leave a shoot that I was in charge of feeling that way. It flies in the face of the whole point of this: filmmaking is supposed to be fun! It just is. Have fun with it and don’t be a cacahead. Being well-organized is the key to that.

Tune in next time for another exciting episode of How to Make a Music Video. Now that you have all your paperwork in order, and presumably you have your crew selected, it’s time to make the sucker! That’s what we’ll talk about in Part 5: Video Thrilled the Radio Star.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5, Part 6