The Film Is Decided Before We Shoot. Here Is What That Week Looks Like.

People do not expect this when they hire us. By the time we show up with cameras, the film is already decided. The hard thinking is done. Shoot day is mostly execution.

That surprises people because production is the visible part. It is the part with gear in it. But a shoot is maybe fifteen percent of whether a film works. The rest happened in a room a week earlier, and it is the part most video teams rush.

Why we stopped skipping this

Early on I did what most young filmmakers do. Show up, get beautiful footage, figure out the story in the edit. Some of those films turned out fine. The problem was that I could not tell you in advance which ones would.

That is a terrible way to run a business, and it is worse for the client. They are paying real money out of a ministry budget. They should not be buying a coin flip.

So we moved the risk earlier. If the story is going to fail, it should fail on paper on a Tuesday, when fixing it costs a conversation instead of a shoot day.

The creative brief

Before anything else, you get a real document. Not a mood board. A brief that answers what this film is for, who it is talking to, what one thing it needs them to do, and whose story carries it.

The question that does the most work is the narrowest one. Who is the one person this film is about? Not the ministry. One person. Films about organizations do not move anybody, because nobody has ever cried about an organization.

If you cannot say what your film is about in one sentence, you are not ready to shoot it. You are ready to keep talking.

We write that sentence together and both sign off on it. Everything after that gets measured against it. If a shot does not serve that sentence, it does not go in, no matter how good it looks.

The story arc, on paper

Then we map the arc. Where it starts, what changes, where it lands. This is the piece that separates a film from a nice video, and it is almost always missing when a church shows me something that did not perform.

A montage of smiling people is not an arc. Something has to be different at the end than it was at the beginning, and the viewer has to feel the difference rather than be told about it.

We also decide what we are leaving out. That conversation is uncomfortable and it is the most valuable hour of the project. Every ministry has more it wants to say than one film can hold, and the temptation is to fit it all in. A film that says four things says nothing.

Planning the interview

We build the questions in advance, and we do not send them to the person ahead of time. Rehearsed answers are dead on camera. You can hear it immediately, and so can everyone watching.

We plan to ask about the hard part first, while they are still slightly nervous, because that is when people tell the truth. The polished version shows up about twenty minutes in, once they have relaxed and remembered they are being filmed.

We also decide in advance what we will not ask. If someone is telling us about the worst year of their life, they should know where the edges are before they sit down. Getting that part wrong is the fastest way to make a film that helps the ministry and hurts the person in it.

The shot list and the paper edit

The shot list comes out of the arc, not out of a general desire for b-roll. Each shot is there because a specific moment in the story needs it. That is why our shoot days are calmer than people expect. We are not hunting for material.

We also do a paper edit before we shoot, which means we write the rough order of the film as if it already exists. It is always wrong in places. That is the point. Finding out on paper that the middle sags is free. Finding out in the edit costs a reshoot.

When we tell a client to wait

Sometimes this process ends with us saying the film is not ready. The story has not happened yet, or the person at the center of it is not in a place to tell it, or what the ministry actually needs is not a film.

That is a real conversation we have had, and it costs us the project. I would rather lose the work than take money for a film I already know will be soft. A weak film does not just waste the budget. It teaches the board that video does not work, and that decision lasts for years.

Do the first part yourself this week

You do not need us for the most valuable step. Before you book anybody, write one sentence: this film is about [one person] who [changed in one specific way].

If you can write it, you are ready to talk to a filmmaker and you will get a much better film, from us or from anyone. If you cannot write it, that is the actual problem, and no amount of production will cover it.

We put the full version of our brief on one page. Seven questions, the story arc structure, and the interview questions that get real answers. It is free and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.