Often, one does similar sorts of video more than once. You might be doing a series of music videos for a band, or interviews for your business, or documenting church services or football games weekly, or shooting backstage footage for multiple feature films. Wouldn’t it be great if you had some way of guiding these repeated processes so they came out perfectly each time?
You may need a checklist.
I discovered the beauty of checklists on a three-season show I did for NBC/Universal called Brew Dogs.
The show traveled the world and, in each city we visited, the hosts would brew a stunty craft beer with a local brewery. We brewed at 13,000 feet using solar power, on a float during a Fourth of July parade, on a train, under the ice…You get the idea.
After the beer was brewed, we held a tasting at the brewery so the public could decide if it was any good. The tastings were shot live in a bar with 200 guests, pretty much in real time.
Being “real” events, the tastings were a bit chaotic. We had to coordinate sound, script, ad-libs, lighting, timing, legal releases for the guests and more. And there were always questions: What props did the brewery need to have on hand? What time were we starting? Which cameras were on the stars, and which ones on the audience? Who was shooting insert shots? When should we serve the beer? Who was introducing whom?
After doing this a couple of times, I borrowed a tool pilots have been using for decades: The Checklist. Pilots don’t go “Yeah, looks good!” and start the engines on that A300– they go step by step through a meticulous checklist so they don’t forget something like, say, putting down the flaps. They work from a written sheet every time they fly.
A production checklist can also help save lives. Yours, if you’re the producer of the show, for example. The key to checklists is to make them thoughtfully, and then follow them religiously.
For our tastings, we laid out each step of production in order of when it had to happen, and distributed copies to the entire crew.
Here’s a sample entry from the timeline:
- T-45:00: Props and Steve meet in Kitchen to make sure all PROPS are in place.
-
- The Beer
- 200-250 Tasting glasses. These must be glass, no plastic and no logos.
- Trays for waiters/bartenders
- Pitchers for refilling
- Garnish, if any (i.e American flag toothpicks in Phil.)
- Display table for beer pouring/setup, display of any related items.
Having a checklist meant fewer steps accidentally skipped, less time wasted in trying to remember how we did it last time. The tastings shoots smoothed out, and we had more time to play around and get better footage.
Try a checklist next time you realize “I’ve done something just like this before!” Even if you’re not shooting something repetitive (or something that involves beer) you may find a checklist helpful. Shooting chaos doesn’t have to be chaotic.
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Steve Stockman is a writer/ producer/ director in Los Angeles. How to Shoot Video That Doesn't Suck, available in 9 languages, is the best selling video how-to book in the world. You can find the updated edition from Workman Publishing wherever you get books, ebooks or audiobooks. 
That's great- No one can say no to the importance of Checklist