He landed at two in the afternoon with seven days and a list of fourteen locations. He had the camera out within the hour, filming the street from the taxi, and then walked until evening shooting everything he saw. By day four his back hurt, his cards were full and his notes had run together. On day six the scene he had travelled for finally happened: the man who had been avoiding him opened his house and invited him to the family lunch. And he was at his worst, with one battery in the camera.
The problem was not the gear and not luck. It was the schedule. A trip that starts at maximum energy ends at minimum energy on the day you need it most.
Day one is not a shooting day
This is the most important sentence here. Day one is for arriving, walking, looking, and meeting the people you will film. The camera is with you, but you use it for general shots, not for the scenes the film rests on.
Three reasons. You do not know the place yet, however much you read about it, so What should you know about a place before you arrive? prepares you but does not replace seeing it with your own eyes. The people do not know you yet, and the first camera you raise at someone sets the shape of your relationship for the rest of the days. And you have just come off a flight and out of a different time zone, so your decisions today are the worst decisions of the trip.
What you do on day one: walk the filming area during good light and shoot possible locations on your phone, meet whoever helps you on the ground as in The Local Fixer: Who Opens Doors in a Place You Don't Know, and write the schedule for the remaining days from what you saw rather than what you imagined at home.
Seven days split
| Day | Its job | What you shoot |
|---|---|---|
| One | Arrival and orientation | General shots, scouting locations, no core scenes |
| Two and three | The heavy filming | The scenes the film rests on, in the best light |
| Four | Flexible day | Catching up on slippage, or a scene that appeared in the first three days |
| Five and six | What needs trust | The main interview, the house, the private moments |
| Seven | The missing shots | Details, transitions, the closing scene, and departure |
The logic of this order is that scenes needing people's trust do not happen on arrival day. Trust is built over days, and your daily filming in front of them is what builds it. That is why the best material you come home with tends to come from the last third of the trip.
Conversely, the scenes that depend on nobody get shot early: the city, the road, the market, the landscape. If a day is lost to rain or some setback, what you lose is the material you can make up.
The flexible day is not a luxury
Day four is empty on paper, and it is the most important day in the schedule. Something happens on every trip: an appointment slips, a road closes, a person backs out, a scene appears that was never in the plan. If your schedule is full from day one to day seven, any delay eats a core scene. If it has an empty day in it, the delay eats the empty day.
And if you arrive to find the film collapsing from the foundations, that is a different road, described in What do you do when the film collapses and you are already there?.
Three scenes a day
The number a beginner writes in the schedule is six locations. The number he actually delivers is three. One real scene needs arrival, waiting, getting acquainted, filming, sound and cutaways, and all of that is no less than two hours when everything goes your way.
Write three items in each day's plan, in order: the core scene, the second scene, and a third if time is left. Do not write four, because four makes you rush the first.
This is the opposite of what you do at home, where concentrated filming in a place you know follows a different logic, set out in How to film a whole week in one day. On the road, the place itself takes time from you.
Light rules the schedule
Divide every day into four windows and do not fight the light:
- One to two hours after sunrise: landscapes, streets, markets that open early.
- Ten until three: interiors, interviews, shaded places, and transferring files.
- The two hours before sunset: the most important exterior scene of your day.
- After sunset: night if you need it, otherwise your day is done.
The second window is the one people waste on exterior filming before asking why the image looks so harsh. Give it to interiors and desk work.
One hour every evening with no filming
Before you sleep, one hour: copy the files to two drives, name the day's folder, run a quick eye over what you shot, and write three lines about what happened and what is missing. That hour is the difference between coming home with material and coming home with an archive you cannot read, and it is what prevents the scene described in Four hundred clips and no film.
The review is not only about quality. What you discover most often is that you shot the scene and not what surrounds it: no wide shot to place it in, no detail to cut away to. Whoever discovers that in the evening fixes it in the morning. Whoever discovers it after coming home does not.
Rest is a line in the schedule
Sleep, food and some time without a camera are items in the production plan, not a reward that comes after it. A trip where you film fourteen hours a day gives you two good days and five flat ones. A trip where you film eight attentive hours gives you seven equal days. The difference shows up in the edit, not in the camera.
Before you book the ticket
- How many days do you actually need? Divide the number of core scenes by three, then add an arrival day and a flexible day.
- What is the most important day of the trip? An event, an appointment, a weekly market. Build the schedule around it and book the flight to match.
- Which scene, if you lose it, leaves you with no film? Put it in the first half, and shoot it again in the second half from another angle.
- What do you do in the last hour before the airport? One final copy onto a second drive, in a different bag from the camera.
A good schedule does not make the trip easier. It makes the best part of it land on a day when you are ready for it.