What is a Movie Short List?

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Rhett Reiger, White Caspian Studios, on behalf of Expert Village. Talk for a minute about Shot Lists. Shot Lists are something in addition to Storyboarding, which we talk about in another segment, that is really, really helpful to everybody on the set. But especially between the Director and the Director of Photography, or the DP for short. A Shot List is basically the Director's way of saying, "In this scene I would like to see this progression of shots". Now this is something that can change, you can go from a wide to a medium to a close and then back to a medium. Or, you could do it different. But the basic idea is, just as in a Storyboard, Storyboard shows the Director of Photography what the Director is trying to visualize, this actually breaks it down a little bit more in detail, to say "This is the individual shots I'm going to try to get". So, typically this would be on a small sheet, but for sake of being visual, I'm going to do it on a large piece of paper. On scene six, we would have something like character A and then the scene starts out with a wide shot of let's say, the garden, o.k. Now, we're then going to progress, wide shot to a, let's say a medium shot, character A. O.k., and then character A is talking to character B, so there we're going to reverse medium shot. Medium shot character B, and so on and so forth. This is going to give the Director of Photography a basic idea of how the Director is going to approach the scene via the shot progression. This is so helpful because if the Director of Photography and the Director have different ideas on how the scene is going to progress, it can be very frustrating. Especially for the Director when the DP has got his camera and his lights all set up and then he says, "No, no, we're not going to do that kind of a shot. I wanted this kind of a shot". And they have to reset everything up. So again just like in Storyboards, Shot Lists save money. They take a little bit of time in preproduction, but they save money."