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One of the most important skills you can have in video production is the ability to think fast.
Working on a shoot, whether it’s on location or post-production, can be extremely stressful. There’s a lot of responsibility to get things right and never quite as much time as you’d like. Filmmaking can sometimes feel like it’s equal parts creativity and problem-solving. You can be as creative as you like, but if you can’t think on your feet you’re going to run into problems.
No matter how much planning has gone into a project, it takes just a few minutes for even the best laid plans to unravel!
There are all kinds of challenges faced along the way in a typical shoot. These can range from a minor inconvenience that makes a tight schedule tighter to major mishaps which threaten to derail an entire shoot and leave the card in your camera empty. The trick to navigating these issues is to cultivate the right perspective on things: stay calm, remain civil, and be ready and able to come up with a contingency plan when it’s needed.
Simply put: “thinking fast” is all about having the experience to turn lemons into lemonade. Or a problematic shoot into a great finished product.
Experience Helps
Experience matters when it comes to thinking fast. Experience won’t always stop production disasters from happening. But knowing, inside and out, the steps involved with production means being able to anticipate the problems you may be up against. Like a doctor who’s seen a patient with every imaginable problem at some point, the more productions a person has been involved with, the quicker and more accurately they can prescribe the right solution when issues occur.
Experience also means knowing more than just your job. Understanding more than simply your own role on a production means that you can empathise with other members of the team. This helps crew members to support one another as they find ways to complete the overall jigsaw puzzle that is any single production.
Just about any problem on a shoot could be solved by throwing money at it. However, this simply isn’t always feasible. Smaller, more restrictive budgets require that we as filmmakers be well-versed in creative problem solving. It could be that a piece of equipment isn’t available for a vital shot. It may be that you have some on-set malfunction, your lead actors comes down with the flu the day before you shoot, or your 1st AD drives the rented tech van into the side of a bus.
All of these have, at some point, happened in the history of video production. We should know. They happened to us. (Our 1st AD is a much better driver nowadays, fortunately!)
Thinking Outside the Box
As Sin City director Robert Rodriguez famously said: “If I don't have enough time and money, I'm going to have to get really creative... So many of those [big budget] things take away from the creative process because they change your limitations. I'd rather have less of those resources and have to utilize more creativity to balance it out.”
When challenges come our way during a shoot, we try and follow the same set of rules. First and foremost, we’re frank and honest about the problem we’re facing. We’ll discuss any issues with our client and figure out together what the best way forward might be.
We’ll also make it our priority to get the project over the line without compromising the final product any more than we have to.
Filmmaking requires thinking on the fly and, sometimes, you’ve got to realize that the thing you want just isn’t feasible -- or maybe it wasn’t particularly necessary anyway. On other occasions, that same quick thinking can let us reshuffle the schedule in order to accommodate things like bad weather or access to certain locations.
Ultimately, filmmaking is a juggling act, and it’s about managing expectations and making the best of any given situation. Stress affects the quality of your output and can do anything from cause tension on set to making people buckle under pressure. But you also don’t want to waste clients’ time or money. Ultimately, you just need to be able to handle every situation as it comes. And like you would a muscle, train your mind to think fast.
