December 6, 2016
Amir Shehata
Someone once told me that pre-production is even more important than production. Holy, is that ever so true. How smoothly production goes depends to a large degree on how much work you put into pre-production. You know what they say, measure twice, cut once. Yeah, that’s true for film-making too.
But I gotta admit, indie film-making, well more accurately no budget film-making, has its own rules sometimes. When you’re working with people who are volunteering their time, you can’t stretch them too thin. And in my case, you know with a full time job, a family and kids, it gets difficult to find the time to put into a proper pre-production phase. Of course someone will come along and say, well if something is important you better make the time. The only response I have to that is, take a project management course, then let's talk. Something gotta give. There has to be a compromise somewhere, and that compromise will depend largely on your priority and how flexible other aspects of your life are, and how much support system you have at home.
Absolute perfection is not achievable. What I say though, is you can give it your best with the resources you have at hand. You’ll always encounter people (even ones working with you) that push you even further, and believe it or not, that’s a good thing, even though it might be uncomfortable sometimes. However, you have to be the judge of how far is too far.
In my experience, it’s a juggling act of how good you can make the movie within your means without running the risk of not finishing it at all. And that’s always my greatest fear. Not finishing something I started. For me that’s a bigger failure than finishing something that might not be perfect. Beside life is a learning experience, and this will not be the last project you work on, hopefully, so you take what you learn and apply it in your next project.
Boy, that was long winded. In conclusion, I agree that pre-production is important, but you have to look at the resources at hand and make sure to use them as efficiently as possible, and don’t let the idea of perfection grind you to a halt. Anyway, that’s my two cents.
The way I figure it, the more projects you work on, the better you’ll become, the more efficient you’ll be, which will translate into better products, which will motivate people to work with you, eventually resulting in even better output… Ah, the cycle of life.
Originally, when I started working on Turning Point I had planned for six episodes. Each one would be about 20 minutes long. I designed the structure of each episode in such a way that it could be broken up into four, five minute mini webisodes, or it could be viewed as one longer episode. This would allow me to later market it as either a web-series or a standard TV format series.