Director of Photography Preparation

Many of the extracts below have been taken from Paul Wheeler - Practical Cinematography as a very useful resource of information for cinematography.


The DP’s Preparation Research: 

“While it is the DP’s job to interpret the script and the director’s vision of that script, it is an immense help if you can base your imagined pictures on reality - it brings a greater believability to the finished film.”

“Making up your own scrapbooks is an excellent way to accumulate images and enables you to add pictures from newspapers and magazines to your collection.”

“When i am stuck for an image to work from, just flicking through a couple of scrapbooks will as often as not start my mind off down an interesting path - not necessarily from a particular picture, but somehow to randomness fires up ideas and unlocks my visual imagination.”


Preparing for the shoot: 

Recces - The recce, the English colloquial abbreviation for reconnoitre (location scouting) comes in two parts:

1) Recceing with the director and/or location manager some time prior to principal photography is usually productive and enjoyable

2) The technical recce, which usually occurs just a week or two before the shoot commences, where the DP has to finalise all the technical requirements, is usually straightforward hard work. Recceing with the director and other department heads is a most creative process. It is the time, if you haven't worked together before, to get to know each other and understand each other’s visualisation of the film.


The Camera Equipment List: 

The camera equipment list will probably be published twice. The line producer or production manager will usually ask the DP early on in the production run-up for a guess, or wish list, of the equipment that will be required as the basic kit in order to get competitive quotes from different suppliers. For professional practice it is good to follow this rule of thumb. Once the supplier has been chose, the recce is over and a basic list can be decided upon, it is vital that you provide this new list as soon as possible. This is so everything can be time organised to arrive when it is needed.


List that would be expected to fill out: 

• (Camera)

• (Zoom Lenses)

• (Prime Lenses)

• (Telephoto Prime Lenses)

• (Camera Accessories)

• (Video Assist Accessories)

• (Filters)

• (Grip Equipment)

• (Heads and Legs)

Obviously not all of this would be expected necessarily for a student film shoot, however it provides an outline of what would be expected professionally which i will try to follow as close as i can after seeing the location, as a recce is being organised soon.

Another list that needs to be created is a “Lighting List” but someone else is taking up the role of lighting during our production, so i will be talking with them in order to get this created once they have decided what is needed.


The technical schedule: 

This is basically a very accurate daily list of all my requirements for the whole of a film. Before going on a recce, enter ‘Camera: Normal Kit’ and ‘Lighting: Normal Kit’ on all the shoot days to the schedule. Then, enter you days off so that they show on the agenda; this gives you an entry for every day of the whole shooting period. Then, referring to the production’s draft schedule, enter the scene numbers you are going to shoot on all the given dates.

Having prepared your schedule this way as you go round the locations on the technical recce, all you have to enter are the changes from the normal kit. For a small shoot such as the one i will be on, the technical schedule will likely only span over the course of half a week or so and i will be on location everyday, but this is something that i will still be creating to as much detail as possible.

“By producing this kind of technical schedule you make it easy for the office to keep the production on track and you have created a situation whereby you will be bothered far less on the set as things change. Hence, you get more time to do what you really enjoy - shooting the film!”