The pre-production checklist, in the order things actually break
Pre-production is not a mood. It is a short list of documents that have to exist before the first shoot day, each one due before the next one can start, and each one with a specific disaster attached to its absence. This is that list, in dependency order, sized for the jobs most people actually shoot: shorts, spots, music videos and brand films.
| What must exist | What its absence costs |
|---|---|
| Locked script or brief | Every department plans against it. Change it after breakdown and every document downstream is quietly wrong. |
| Scene breakdown | Locations, cast, props, wardrobe per scene. This is where the budget stops being a guess. |
| References gathered | The look, agreed with pictures rather than adjectives. 'Moody' means a different film to every person in the room. |
| Storyboards or frames for the money shots | Not every shot. The ones that are expensive, dangerous or non-negotiable. |
| Shot list, numbered | The running order the AD schedules from. See what belongs on it. |
| Lighting plans for the hard setups | The gaffer prelights from a diagram, not from a conversation on the morning. |
| Schedule with durations | Shot durations summed per scene tell you the day is too long while it is cheap to fix. |
| Crew handover pack | Script, boards, shot list, plans, one file or one link. If it lives in six inboxes it is not a plan. |
Lock the script before you break it down
Everything in pre-production is derived from the script or the brief. The breakdown reads it scene by scene, the boards visualise it, the shot list schedules it. Which is why an unlocked script is the most expensive document on a production: every revision after breakdown day silently invalidates work in four other places, and nobody notices until the shoot day surfaces the disagreement. Lock it, or at least version it so everyone can say which draft they planned against.
Break it down before you board it
The breakdown is the least glamorous document and the one that turns a film into a budget: which scenes need which location, who is in them, what has to be built, bought or borrowed. Do it before boarding, because the breakdown is where you discover that two scenes can share a location, or that one scene cannot be afforded at all, and there is no point drawing frames for a scene that dies in the next meeting.
Agree the look with pictures
References are not decoration. They are the only reliable way to agree on photography before any exists, because adjectives do not survive the trip between heads. Collect stills, frames from other films, photographs of the location at the right hour, and put them where the whole crew can see them. When the DP and the director have argued about the references in prep, they do not argue about the monitor on the day.
Board the money, list everything
Storyboarding every shot of a small production is prep theatre. Board the shots that are expensive, dangerous or compositionally non-negotiable, and let coverage be coverage. The shot list is the document that has to be complete, because it is the one the schedule is built from. If it is not on the list, it does not get scheduled, and if it is not scheduled it does not get shot.
Duration is the honest column
Put an estimated screen duration on every shot and sum it per scene. The total is a rough cut of the film before anything is shot, and a rough cut of the day before anyone is called. It will be wrong shot by shot and right in the aggregate, and it is the earliest possible warning that the plan does not fit the daylight.
Hand over one thing
The final act of pre-production is giving the plan to the people who execute it, in one place. A crew that receives the script by email, the boards by link, the shot list by screenshot and the schedule by rumour will reconstruct a slightly different production per person. One pack, one link, current by definition.