Directing a shoot you are not at
The problem is that advice given on a call lives inside one person, and people leave.
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 actually 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 rather than over it. 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.
Why does the same instruction need giving twice?
Because a phone call is a container that does not survive its listener.
Advice given on a Tuesday lives in one person's memory, plus whatever notes they took, which is usually nothing. When they hand over to a colleague, they pass on what they remember of what you said, filtered through eight months of doing it their own way. Two handovers later, your framing preference is a rumour about a framing preference.
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
Which microphone, and where it clips. How loud to record, given as a mark on whatever meter the device shows rather than as an adjective: the loudest moments of ordinary speech landing around two thirds of the way up the meter, and the meter never touching the top, where the sound distorts and no edit can rescue it. Not too quiet means something different to everyone; a mark on the meter does not. And the check almost nobody performs: record thirty seconds of the empty room, listen on headphones, and deal with whatever is humming before anything gets filmed.
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 it at the top of the page on its own line, phrased as an instruction rather than a preference: do not come back without this. Everything else can be got wrong and worked around. This one cannot.
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.
Not a video call, which costs you both a slot in the diary and arrives when it suits neither of you. A still photograph, on their phone, of what the camera is seeing. It takes a minute, it arrives while everything can still be moved, and it catches the failures that are expensive afterwards: the wrong side lit, a plant growing out of somebody's head, the camera too low, an open door with a corridor in it.
Of everything here, this is the one to insist on. A minute of somebody else's time removes most of the day's risk.
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 second document nobody opens on the day, there for whoever eventually asks why.
What you are actually 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.
Keep reading
This is a service, and the method is written down.
Everything above came out of doing the work rather than writing about it. If you want the method instead of the story, it runs in order on one page.
Start with a free audit
Tell us where your content is now. We will come back with what we would change and what result to expect.
A person reads the channel and writes the audit by hand: a considered read typically takes three working days. That is the usual shape, not a promised turnaround. We use these details only to reply to you: no lists, no lurking.
What you will get
A fit snapshot: where your channel stands, and whether we are a match.
Two to three opportunities: specific, prioritised, yours to keep.
A recommended next step, even if that step is not us.
The audit is free and commits you to nothing: nobody follows up with a call you did not ask for.