Six hours of shooting sits inside a fourteen-hour day. This is what the other eight hours are.
People imagine the job is the shoot. The shoot is the short part. Here is an ordinary Thursday, start to finish, on a commercial job with a crew of four.
06:00 — Load
Cases were packed the night before and checked against the list twice: bodies, glass, three heads, stands, sandbags, modifiers, gaffer tape, and the spare of everything that has ever failed on us. Batteries came off charge at midnight. The van is loaded heaviest-first so nothing shifts on the motorway.
08:00 — Build
An hour of the schedule is set aside for building the set before anyone from the client arrives, and it is never enough. Stands go up, the key gets flagged, we shoot a gray card and a test frame, and the laptop is tethered and color-managed before the first real subject walks in.
10:00 — Shoot
The part everybody pictures. Four hours, roughly nine hundred frames, of which perhaps forty will be shown and twelve delivered. The work here is mostly conversation — the technical decisions were made during the build, and if they were made well you should be able to spend the shoot looking at the person rather than the histogram.
15:00 — Strike and back up
Strike takes half as long as build and is twice as easy to get wrong, because everyone is tired. Cards are copied to two drives before a single one is formatted. That rule has no exceptions:
- Card to working drive.
- Working drive to backup drive.
- Verify both.
- Only then format.
18:00 — Select
Culling is the skill nobody teaches. First pass is a yes/no on technical grounds. Second pass is a yes/no on expression. Third pass is the edit — which frames, in which order, tell the story the client actually commissioned.
A shoot is not finished when the lights come down. It is finished when the client can open a folder and immediately see what they paid for.
21:00 — Send
A first selection goes out the same evening, even when the contract allows a week. Momentum is worth more than polish at this stage; the polish comes on Monday, and by then the client has already fallen for three of the frames.