If there’s one thing I try to hammer home with anyone starting out in this business, it’s this: pre-production is the most important part of making a commercial. Not the shoot day. Not the edit. The weeks before anyone says action.
Here’s why. When a shoot day feels tense, when the crew is frustrated or the client is anxious or the footage just isn’t landing the way it should, it’s rarely because of something that happened that morning. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the actual cause is something that got missed, rushed, or never fully nailed down back in prep.
I like bringing up Hitchcock when I talk about this, because he took it to an extreme that I find genuinely useful to think about. In his famous interviews with François Truffaut back in the 1960s (collected in a book that’s still worth reading today), Hitchcock said that once the screenplay was finished, he had already made the film in his head, down to the final cut. Actually shooting it, for him, was almost a formality.
I don’t find shoot days boring, not even close. But I think about his logic constantly. Your time in pre-production is the cheapest time you will ever have on a project. Once you’re on set, every single hour costs real money: crew rates, gear rentals, location fees, all ticking while you figure things out. So the smart move is to front-load as much thinking, planning, and problem-solving as you possibly can, while you’re still sitting comfortably at a desk instead of standing on location with forty people waiting on you.
At Ockham, that shows up in a few concrete ways. We build treatments and mood boards to establish the tone and visual language of a project before anyone touches a camera. We build detailed shot diagrams, not just a spreadsheet of shot numbers and vague descriptions, but actual top-down layouts showing where the camera, the talent, and the set pieces live for every setup. We take scout photos with a director’s viewfinder app that lets us frame shots on location using the actual lens we plan to shoot with, so we know exactly what we’re getting before the crew ever arrives. And on projects where timing and pacing really matter, especially comedy, we’ll cut a rough pre-edit using nothing but placeholder cards, just to see if the plan actually holds together as a piece of storytelling before we commit a full crew day to it.
None of that is about killing spontaneity on set. It’s the opposite. The more thoroughly a project is prepped, the more room there actually is on the day to say yes when a DP or an actor brings you a better idea in the moment. You can only really be creative and flexible on set when you’re not simultaneously trying to solve problems that should have been solved weeks earlier.
