Know when you are ready to pick a camera

There's no point showing up on set and setting up some shot if you are not sure where that shot belongs in the larger context of the film. Filmmaking is not a game of "make it as you go"; maybe at the first draft stage of writing you can take that liberty ... but not on set ... unless you are self-funded and don't care to make any returns on the investment and have no concern for public appreciation or critical acknowledgement.

Before you get on the set to shoot, you are required to assemble a cast and crew, finalize locations, develop the look of your characters, and get a sense of the mood of the film for the lighting and art department to get rolling. None of this can be done without at least an outline in place.

In the picture you see Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas with their master, Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa started out as an assistant director and screenwriter. He worked on 17 films with director Kajiro Yamamoto whose advice to Kurosawa before he started on his first film as director was, "a good director needs to master screenwriting."

The screenplay is a very delicate structure that emerges after tirelessly going over every single possibility conceivable within a certain space and time to reveal a sequence of events that play out in a character's life that can affect the audience and leave an indelible mark on their perception. Everything in the character's life exists as per the requirement of the sequence only to aid the flow of events and the desired affect on the audience.

This is preparation that is not optional. Even if you do not subscribe to a particular screenplay format, you must have the sequences laid out and the characters well defined ... only then can you organize the ingredients required and pool them together in the same space that you can then call your film's set. The more prepared you are, having utilized the luxury of time and relatively inexpensive overheads of the scripting and preparation stage, the better the output you'll derive from the highly time and cost sensitive production phase.

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