Staying Organized and Efficient

How does Slugger know what photos to take? Well, it might surprise you, but up until a few months ago, I used to just wing it! 😅

I'd go to my photography rig and say to myself "hmm, what shot might look good in this video?"

As you can probably guess, this was very inefficient. I would often forget scenes I needed, and as a result, have to follow up with multiple rounds of pickup shots.

These days, I have a different process:

After recording a script and editing the music to the timeline, I now add an additional step where I go through the video and do an initial visual editing pass. This means that I try to pull from my pre-existing B roll library when I can, but when I can't, I write a note on what type of shot I need for that sentence of the script. Throughout the process, these notes add up, and before long I have a full shot list!

Then, when I go to photograph things, I know EXACTLY what shots are needed for each video. As I shoot them, I cross them off the list and move on to the next one. Because they're written down in chronological order, this also helps me avoid having two shots with the same background colour appear back to back in a video, (sometimes that can look weird). Pickup shots are rare these days!

Now, I know for a lot of sensible people out there, this process might be obvious, but apparently it wasn't for me! I won't lie though - it does add a lot of time to that initial editing phase. Because I'm no longer just adding sound but now also visuals, it can take several additional hours to get through it all. Creating a shot list for the Best/Worst LEGO Pieces video I made took 4 hours - and that's just creating the list of shots I needed! It took another 4 hours to actually take all the photos...

No one said it would be easy!