How to organize a shooting?
Hi everyone, this is xFrame!
Thank you very much for using xFrame.
How have you been recently?
It's been a long time since there was a chance for us to stay here together to share a shooting story like this ^^.
As you may know, in xFrame we have an in-house shooting team (Creative Team), that is in charge of producing new content to release day by day on the website. Have you ever wondered how would professional shooting be? Where to start? Or what is the first step to organizing a shooting session?
Let us show you how and don't hesitate to share yours ^^!
1. Knowing what you are aiming for
We agree with you that the process of creating a creative product should be based on creativity. However, capturing and having a certain image of the creative community around you has never been a superfluous job, especially creativity in a commercial environment. It is better to come prepared than to go to capture the enemy empty-handed, right?
Try taking your time to discover the work of other photographers or popular creative trends through social media, search engines, or different creative platforms!
You can completely update by looking up on xFrame too! By organizing monthly shoots to update creative trends and outstanding social messages with a variety of different image content, xFrame Team hopes to contribute to bringing you the freshest creative messages!
2. Visualizing your ideas
Human creativity is limitless and a normal person can have many ideas if he/she lets their mind flow. But ideas will forever stay in mind if we don’t note them down.
Yes! First but not least, note your ideas down, so that you can take a proper look at them and consider their ability.
Once an idea is picked up, visualize it with some simple words in brief like topic, theme, mood, color, gender, ages,... Those words would be your keywords for searching for reference photos, getting more inspiration, and the mood for the project. That is how a mood board was created and the main theme is slowly developed in this process also. In this step, you could define many small scenes/ concepts for your big picture.
Normally, we will have a creative talk between members of the Creative Team to decide the main topic for the shoot. After that, every idea for the main theme will be transferred into slides so everyone could discuss more.
3. Imagining based on reality
Actually, when considering the ability of your very inceptive idea, you already consider your idea based on reality. After having the main theme, you will need to dig more into that ability to find suitable and available elements for shooting, such as locations, models, props…
List down all the locations that are available at your places, as well as your recommendations for models, photographers, makeup artists,.. all the props for concepts that need to be prepared and where you can find them, and even their prices. You should pick up 1, 2, or even 3 options for backup. You know we all have budgets for projects, so be prepared that your favorite choices do not always have reasonable prices, and you have to balance them.
Start contacting for the resources and decide on the main crew for your project. Pick up a suitable date with the team so you all know the deadline for preparation. This date would be not only based on personal schedule but also the weather if you need some natural elements in your shoot.
Sum up every information such as the brief, mood board, human resources for shooting, as well as locations and props and schedule into slides and share it with your team, so everyone would know the final goal. This slide can be a proposal for your upper department also.
For the coming shooting project, once you can answer 5 W and 1 H ( What, Where, When, Who, Why, and How), you are totally ready for it.
What do you think? We hope you will find this article helpful for your shooting plan and let’s see more from our real shooting session in the next part of this series!!!
Feel free to comment on your ideas and we would be glad to receive your thoughts.
Have a nice day! <3
The xFrame Team
Writer: Ngoc Anh
Editor: Ngoc Hang Thi Luu
