R+P Post 13: Our Shoot-Board

For our shoot we had to make our shoot board. Our shoot board was key to the organisation of the shoot. Our shoot had all the shots in order, the shots were then sorted into locations. This meant for each location we could easily see all the shots we needed to shoot at a glance. It also acted as a tick list to make sure that we filmed each shot.

A shot image was made from a quick sketch using a post it note. This helped us remember the shots we had thought of. It also helped us remember the framing which is essential to every shot. We also had a "Actors/Props" section which made sure we knew exactly what we needed for each shot before the camera even began rolling. This was extremely useful as it made the whole shooting process much more efficient as we could plan the shoot day and call the actors accordingly. We had also planned the Director and Camera-man for each shot in advance, this increased the efficiency of the shoot drastically. Without this we would have to think of who would direct and shoot each shot as it was happening. It potentially saved us hours of valuable time.

A typing shot from our Shootboard

The same typing shot in our final sequence

The shot timings column also helped us see if we were either behind schedule or ahead. During the shoot I learnt that each shot consumes a lot of time despite how long the duration of the shot is. for example a shot that lasts only a few seconds could take up to half an hour due to retakes, setting up and other unforeseen problems. In the future I would overestimate how long a shot will take rather than underestimate.

An extract from our Shootboard

The final two sections were the "Takes" section and "Identify good takes" section. This allowed us to see how many takes we took of each shot and which out of those takes were the best ones. This was extremely useful later in editing as we didn't have to look through every take to find the desired one.

Overall the shoot board was a useful tool in the shooting process. It helped us heavily in terms of organisation and efficiency. However by the time of our main shoot we were very familiar with each shot. Due to this we instead made a shot list. This was essentially a list of shots that we could cross off as we shot them. This was much quicker than the shoot board and was easier to produce short notice as we had made some changes to our sequence after the Test shoot.