Directing a shoot you are not at

Your videographer knows how you like things, because you spent two hours on a call explaining it. Eight months later they move on, a colleague picks up the camera, and the videos change. Not dramatically. The framing is looser, the light is on the wrong side, and the one shot you always need is sometimes not there at all.

Nobody did anything wrong. The instructions were only ever stored in a person, and the person left. The fix is one page with a photograph on it, plus a photograph of the setup sent back to you before anybody presses record.

What goes wrong when you are not in the room?

Not competence.

Whoever is holding the camera is usually perfectly capable of it. What they do not have is the thing you have without noticing: the small preferences you would apply automatically if you were standing there. Which side the light goes. How much space above the head. That the microphone clips under the collar. That there is always a shot of the front of the building, because every video has opened on it for two years.

None of that is difficult, and all of it is invisible until it is missing.

A call reaches one person

An agreement needs a shared record.

A call can settle the decisions; a shared note preserves them. Record the agreed setup and its reasons so a colleague joining later can work from the same information.

Written notes behave differently, and not because they are more detailed. They can be forwarded. Somebody who has never spoken to you reads the same words on their first morning that the first person read on theirs.

What belongs in writing?

Four things, and it is the fourth that gets left out.

Framing

How much space above the head, how much in front of the eyes, whether the subject sits or stands, what is allowed in the background. Add what to do when the room is smaller than usual, because eventually it will be, and that is when somebody improvises.

The light

Where it goes relative to the camera and the subject, and which side. Whether the window gets used or covered. Whether the overhead lights go off, which in most offices they should, because a ceiling light directly above somebody's head puts their eyes in shadow there as reliably as anywhere else.

The sound

Specify the recording level on the actual device’s scale, with a reference recording and headroom for louder moments. Check a short speech test and a room-only recording on headphones before the main take.

The one shot that must exist

Every recurring shoot has one, and it differs for everybody. The wide of the room. The close on the hands. The exterior. The customer saying the sentence the video is built around.

Put essential coverage near the top of the page and explain why it matters. Flag a missing shot while there is still time to make a decision on set.

Why send a picture instead of describing one?

Because a description of a frame is longer, less accurate and open to interpretation. A still frame is none of those.

Send a screenshot from a video that went well, or a photograph of the setup on a day it worked. Framing, light direction, background and distance arrive at once, with nothing left to misread. Match this is shorter than four paragraphs and it is also checkable, because two pictures can be held next to each other and a description cannot.

Do it per setup rather than per shoot. Three photographs covering your recurring setups will outlast several people.

What should you ask for before they press record?

A photograph of the frame, sent to you, before anybody is filmed.

A still from the camera can confirm composition; a short video and audio test can reveal movement, focus or sound problems a photograph misses. Use a call when something needs a joint decision.

Ask for the relevant test while the setup can still change. It catches some avoidable problems before the main recording.

How long should the document be?

Short enough to be read on a shoot morning by somebody already running late.

One page. A photograph per setup. The shots that must exist. The two or three preferences that would otherwise be discovered by getting them wrong. A long document is not a stricter document, it is an unread one, and it fails the same way a phone call fails, with the extra cost of having taken you a day to write.

Everything that did not fit is not lost. It goes in a reference document, there for whoever eventually asks why.

What you are building

The page is the only part of your production that does not resign. Cameras get replaced, the person holding one changes, you get busy and stop attending. A photograph with four sentences underneath survives all of it, and it is why a series filmed by three people across two years still looks like one series.

Write it after a shoot that went well, while you can still remember what made it go well.

Sources and evidence

Our method. The one-page brief with a photograph per setup, and a photograph sent back for approval before anybody presses record, is this studio's own way of keeping a recurring shoot consistent across changes of crew, not a general prescription for every production.