#8 Beyond the Brief: Shooting for the Edit Before You Ever Hit Record
There’s an old military saying that was basically the soundtrack of my childhood growing up in a military family:
“Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.”
The 7 Ps. And while we don’t run a production quite like a military operation, that principle is baked into everything we do before we get on set and a camera ever gets turned on.
Here’s the thing most people don’t think about when they hire a production company.
The edit doesn’t start in post. It starts the moment we read the brief.
Every shot we frame, every scene we build, every moment we choose to capture or let go, all of it is informed by where the content is going to live and how it’s going to be used when it gets there. Web. Social. Amazon. Ads. Vertical. Horizontal. Ten seconds. Ninety seconds. The final deliverable isn’t something we figure out after the shoot. It’s the thing we’re building toward from day one.
I was fortunate early in my career to work alongside an agency and see firsthand how the images and footage we create actually get used downstream. Watching a creative director try to build a campaign out of footage that wasn’t shot with the edit in mind, that’ll change how you think about what you capture forever. I’ve never forgotten it.
But here’s where it gets interesting.
Not every production is a locked script and storyboard. Some jobs are built around capturing moments for a content library and both of those approaches have real value. Where I love to work is right in between those two worlds, structured enough to hit every deliverable, open enough to let something unexpected happen.
We let children play because play is how they learn to solve problems creatively. On set it’s not time to throw out the plan and freestyle but leaving some space to explore, to try something, to follow a moment that wasn’t on the shot list? That’s where the magic lives. We’ve put in enough reps together as a team that we know when we’re all in that flow state. When it happens it’s my favorite place to be on a production.
But even the best plan, the best team, and the best creative flow can get lost in the middle of a big shoot.
That’s where Danielle is such a valuable part of every production.
We had a large production that had multiple locations over a full week. Talent, schedules, crew, product, logistics, snacks…lots of snacks. A lot of moving pieces and then the weather decided to show up at one point and make things interesting.
While we were literally under a pavilion wrapping lights in plastic and rigging umbrellas over lights during a torrential downpour, Danielle was the one keeping her eyes on the whole board. She knows every production inside and out and not just her piece of it, but all of it. Because she never gets so entrenched in any single aspect that she loses sight of the whole, she was able to pivot us multiple times during that week when she could see us drifting off course before we even felt it happening.
It’s easy on a big production to put your blinders on and just keep pushing forward. Someone has to be watching the road.
She’s that person who keeps things (mostly me) on track. Every single production.
The result of all of it, the planning, the creative space, the eyes on the whole board, is content that arrives in post essentially pre-built. The editor isn’t excavating through hours of footage trying to find a story. The story was already there because we knew what we were building before we ever hit record.
That’s not luck. That’s the 7 Ps in action.