Pre-Pro: The Pre-Production Meeting

What is your role, what should you say, and what do you need to participate?

The pre-production meeting, or “pre-pro”, is perhaps the most important stage of the project because it outlines the process, resources, and expectations involved. It usually takes place in the presence of the advertiser or sponsor, director, director’s producer, production designer or other technical staff, writer, art director, corporate management from an ad agency or film company, a graphics compositor or animator, and perhaps others. As the editor, it is vital that you take notes, listen carefully, and bring a stopwatch to use for timing out storyboards if necessary. It is your job to articulate the repercussions of certain decisions if they affect any aspect of the editing or finishing process, and to gather answers for how the production process will be done.

Your opinion may be solicited for your creative input, but not always. Be sensitive to the egos involved in the pre-pro meeting because some participants see it as their only chance to defend their idea before it gets “corrupted” by others. They may not want to hear your ideas even if they are good ones, but if you have something to contribute, by all means make your best play. Often times I have found myself in the role of being the person who says what no one else wants to say since it might involve a budget, time or staffing problem, or something that would affect some aspect of the creative execution that is critically important to the director or writer.

For example, if the production company decides to shoot Sony HDCam-SR rather than HDV or DVCProHD, you will have to account for how the workflow will proceed from that point. Will the HDCam-SR tapes be downconverted or cross-converted? If not, will your editing system handle the power and speed to work with HDCam-SR footage, or a compressed ProRes version of it? Will there be a final re-assembly of the final rough cut in uncompressed HDCam-SR or left in ProRes as final? Who will pay to rent the HDCam-SR VTR?

There are time and cost variables associated with these decisions, and often times the editor’s time and money is considered lower priority compared to the costs of production and talent. You should defend your “territory” at the outset, during the pre-pro, before they become a headache you can’t get away from. Well, how do you do that?

You must also learn to tactfully state the effect of certain proposals so that the ultimate decision can be made by those who serve that role, and in the process not embarrass anyone or be a pain in the butt. For example, if you have provided an estimate for editing a project, and then an idea is brought up to shoot a scene on green screen for compositing, and compositing is not in the budget, there are good ways and bad ways to voice this issue. It would be bad to say out load, “No way, man! That wasn’t in the budget. Can’t do it!” It’s not your money to spend. If they want to spend more, that’s good news for you, but you need to make it clear that that is the case. My rule is, whenever someone suggests doing more than what was proposed, the answer is always “yes…however…”.

My response in this situation would be to turn to the producer, who is responsible for budgets and schedule, and say to him or her, privately, “Compositing was not in my last estimate. Do you want me to give you a revised estimate after the meeting?” or, “We have enough time in the schedule to get the editing done as promised, but I will need to bring on a compositor overnight to make the composite. I can give you a revised schedule and estimate later if you want.”

What these statements do is respect that the producer knows that what is being proposed will blow away your estimate (even if they don’t), and that you have deferred to their role in deciding whether or not the proposed change in the shooting technique will happen or not. You are simply trying to make their decision making process easier. If the producer says, “No, thank you. A revised estimate won’t be necessary,” then you need to ask whether the proposed suggestion will be killed, or completed by some other means. You need some confirmation from the producer that the proposed idea is not your responsibility if it is not including in your estimate, without sounding like a schmuck.

Be sure to obtain an up-to-date storyboard or shooting board (a shooting board is more of a literal description of the scenes to be shot), look it over, and try to play the scenes in your head so that you can imagine what is NOT indicated in the scenes. This includes transitions, space onscreen for graphics and logos, cutaways, continuity issues, and “registration time”. Registration time is the time that is necessary for the viewer to absorb the visual information long enough to comprehend what they just saw before moving onto the next scene. Storyboards often times include voiceover copy and graphics which are easy to absorb when the reader has the luxury of time to finish reading them. But this is not always the case in a :30 second commercial, for instance, where the writer may have written too much dialog for there to be enough time for a voiceover tagline.

Be aware that producers and directors tend to promise more to their clients rather than less, and then worry about the repercussions later. Try to staunch these potential headaches at the outset, in the pre-pro meeting.