Contents:
Introduction
The Filming Details tab is where you create, schedule and manage all of your project’s shoots.
You need to create a session for every shoot that the project requires, but you don’t need to finalise the specific details immediately after creating the project. You can add and edit these when the details become known.
Two key differences between managing filming and pre-production details are:
Your client can add and edit shoot details themselves from the Client Hub.
The information provided here can directly inform your shoot team’s agenda. It is intended to be potentially useful on location.
There is no limit to the amount of shoots a Project can host.
Creating new shoots
To create a scheduled shoot, click the blue “+” icon.
For each shoot, you will be required to provide several data points. The accuracy of this data is important for three reasons:
Communicating and negotiating with the client’s team — they will have access to all of these details via the Client Hub.
Providing your shoot team with essential shoot information, such as shoot time and address.
The details for shoots are the most important of all the project production items.
Provide our management team with data, so they can monitor and assess what it takes to deliver a good project. Good data here will help our system to have a reasonable understanding of our current and future workloads.
Required details
Each shoot that you create requires the following information:
An appropriate name — Try to be as clear and unique as possible. Don’t be against using longer names. After you have created your shoot, this name will be the shoot’s primary identifier — for both your team and your client.
The name you use will also be applied to the scheduled shoot in the production calendar.
The address of the shoot location — If you start with the Street field, an auto-search feature will use Google to help you find and auto-complete the location’s full address.
Shoot date, time, and duration — Schedule your shoot and estimate how long it will take.
Use these details to ensure that your client is on the same page and to help keep your shoot budgets within project scope.
Additional extras — Select to add any of the additional shoot extras that will be required for your project. Click them again to remove them. Each extra will create a calendar event linked to your primary shoot, with the same time and duration. See below for more information on shoot extras.
General comments — These shoot Comments are visible to the client. The client can similarly leave special notes for you and your team here. To view the shoot comments later, hover your cursor over the notes icon.
This is a great place to leave notes specific to each shoot day, such as parking location or contact person on the day.
To edit any of your shoot details later, click on the pencil edit icon on the right. This will open up editable fields whilst still displaying the current details. These details can be edited right up until the current shoot date.
The location map
After you have submitted and saved your new shoot, the VMSX will create and show a map thumbnail in the shoot details, pinning your location. Clicking on this map will open up a new tab in Google Maps, already centred on the pinned location. (Or your mobile device's preferred map application.)
Additional Extras
When you need additional extras for your shoot, you will be booking and scheduling them in collaboration with your Production Manager. Each tagged extra will trigger a flag in the production scheduling calendar that will need to be actioned.
Before assigning any of these extras to your project shoots, you should ensure that the confirmed project budget covers the appropriate costs. These are the sorts of considerations you will have already made before first confirming and activating the project with the client. See the producer’s Project Confirmation Checklist.
Ensuring your extras are correctly tagged here will also help the VMSX system to understand your project’s scope in getting delivered. We should be able to pull some very interesting company-wide analytics between shoot extras and project scopes — eg, do we need more lights? Or to hire more field producers?
These are the additional extras currently available for a shoot:
Additional Shooter — This is a second DOP with a full camera and lighting kit.
Additional Camera — This is a second camera only. It should only ever be added as the third camera for the shoot, as we never send out two cameras with one DOP. Three cameras with two DOPs is acceptable under some circumstances, such as studio shoots.
Shoot Assistant — This is an assistant to the DOP, and does not come with a camera kit.
Director — Usually works on higher end projects, oversees the creative and execution of a production. Ensure you have some pre-production booked for your director as well.
Field Producer — Works across a range of projects, and ensures that project briefs are followed, directs interviews and liaises with the client on set.
Studio — Your project will require some time in one of our studios.
Using our own studios does not usually incur an extra cost to the client.
Travel — You should be adding (and ideally budgeting) for all travel more than 1 hour beyond the offices in Melbourne and Sydney.
Please speak to the Production Manager. Due to calendar restrictions, when travel is added to the project it must be scheduled in manually at the start and end of the shoot day.
Pre-production documents
Feature released Sept 15 2022
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cksy9l56TGNzsh2cXDpdxuD-drCti7UL/view?usp=sharingWhen managing a project with a large number of pre-production documents, you can attach pre-production documents to your shoots here (as well as the edits in Deliveries tab).
For example, if a DOP needs to find a shot list, they can go straight to the shoot details where you will have attached it.
How do you do this?
Select the Pre-Production dropdown associated with the shoot You will get a list of all the project’s pre-production documents.
Select all the documents that relate to this shoot. Click Submit.
You have now created direct links to your relevant documents.
What if I haven’t yet created the pre-production document I need?
You can create new Pre-Production documents directly from your shoot details.
Click on the small +
Choose your document type
The VMS will take you straight to the Pre-Production tab with the new document ready to be set-up. This will automatically be linked to your shoot.
What can the client see?
When accessing the project via Client Hub, your client will be able to see and edit all of the filming details. Their view of these details is exactly the same as yours.
The client can also create (ie, propose) their own shoots, completing all of the details for themselves.
The key difference here is that your Project Chat will publish an alert whenever your client creates or edits shoot details. This ensures that you get a timely opportunity to assess the client’s information and engage with them.
If you are not monitoring your project chat, you will receive an email alert for this event.
Completing your shoots
Unlike other VMSX tasks and deliverables, your shoots do not have statuses and there is no requirement for you to “deliver” or “complete” them.
A shoot is either:
Scheduled and in the future, or
In the past and locked.
When a shoot’s scheduled date moves into the past, the VMSX will lock it off and it can no longer be edited by producer or client. It will remain visible and on record.
