1. Always have a designated, organized spot for your gear

Now that you’ve arrived on set with all your gear and loaded it all out, take the necessary time to organize it before you start shooting. This is why rental houses sometimes offer gear trolleys. Having your gear well-organized and easily accessible on set is vital to your shoot going smoothly. Take a look around set and determine a central location you can keep all your gear that’s not a trip hazard, not in the way of any shots, and easily accessible. If more than one person needs to use the gear table at once, make sure it’s accessible from multiple angles.

One method is to tape off sections on a tabletop and label the areas — lenses, filters, charged & dead batteries, grip equipment, lights, gels, modifiers, stands, sandbags — all of it should have a home where it goes back to. Have a designated charging station and a system by which to label or organize charged and dead batteries (red/green tape work well). If you’re renting equipment, take a picture of the gear before it comes out of the box so you know what you rented and how it was organized (this will save you a headache later). If you think it might help and you have a lot of gear, print off a gear checklist to have on hand so you can ensure you don’t lose anything, and have an easy reference for what gear you have on set. Clear and reserve a space on the table for gear prep. Think of it like a well organized kitchen — you need adequate and organized storage and working space to run efficiently. If there’s an ounce of Marie Kondo-level obsessive organizer within you, now is the time to let it out.

Your gear will be one of the biggest distractions for you on set if it’s in disarray. Spending energy and frustration on wondering where the batteries are, or that little screw for the tripod plate, or trying to make space to prep your gear, all take away from your concentration on actually shooting the film. A set is already chock full of tension and stress from all directions anyway, might as well do what you can to minimize that. Being organized behind the camera is the least you can do.

[Quick aside] Take a minute to visualize yourself gearing up for a shot. Think of all the little pieces of gear you need to put in place to get that shot: lenses, batteries, SD cards, tripod plates, filters — all of these are small, important, and easy to misplace. Many of these electronic miscellany also have two or more possible “states” — for example, an SD card can be empty or full, backed up or awaiting backup. Batteries are empty, charged, or charging. It’s important to have a system in place to make sure this is clear. There are many ways to keep this organized, but it’s best to find one that works for you and doesn’t in itself take a lot of time. Something as simple as three colours of tape can do it, or multiple labelled tupperware containers.

2. Make sure everybody knows what they’re responsible for, where everything is, and how they can help

If you’re working on a low/no budget short passion project as I was, this assumes you have good enough friends or kind enough acquaintances to volunteer their time as a grip or AC. If you do (please do, for your own sake), then just be sure that everybody knows what they’re responsible for and how they can help you. Firstly, nobody likes standing around on a set, especially if they’re volunteering. They don’t want to feel like they’re wasting their time. Remember, you’re a team leader in your position. You might want to do a grip/camera stand-up meeting before shooting to see if anyone has any questions. Walk everybody through the gear so they know where everything is and your processes for labeling batteries, etc. Make yourself open and available to questions. Make sure they know they’re important to the production of the film, and you need them—because you do.

Miscommunication, or lack of communication, is one of the biggest contributors to mistakes and delays on film sets that I’ve seen. It’s not always totally neglectful—there is so much jumping around in your head as a DP or director that it’s easy to forget to designate who should be running batteries or setting up the dolly for the next shot. You won’t remember every little thing. But, make an effort to cover your bases, and above all, communicate.

Oh, and don’t intimidate your team or vent your frustration on them. They’re trying to help you. More on that later.

3. Speak up

Don’t be afraid to speak up if something goes wrong. If your gear is malfunctioning mid-shot, if your battery dies (keep an eye on your battery levels), if your gimbal goes wonky, communicate this to your director who will cut, or just cut it yourself (let the director know ahead of time you may have to cut for technical reasons). It’s not worth being polite and staying quiet because it wastes precious time. If you need to go again for technical reasons, tell the director and AD to ensure you have time. If you don’t have the shot for technical reasons, nobody will know if you don’t speak up, and if you don’t have the shot then you need to go again. Trust your judgment, or better yet, trust playback. If you’re not happy with an aspect of the shot but it’s still usable, voice it to the director and they will determine whether you have the time to do it again or if you live with it and move on. It’s a game of compromises.

4. It’s okay to be frustrated on set, but don’t lash out and don’t be passive aggressive

Working on set can be frustrating and stressful for everyone and anyone. The hours are long, a lot can go wrong, and there’s a lot of pressure on you to do a great job. Especially as cinematographer, you may feel immense pressure as the look of the film rides mostly on you. All of this is true, but there is still no reason to be an asshole. Take a breath before you sharply condescend or retort to someone’s reasonable request. If you’re trying to focus on something and somebody is asking you a question (expect to receive many questions near constantly), just tell them to hang on a second while you finish what you’re doing, or put it down and talk to them.

Remember that everybody else is trying to do their best as well, and they also face their own pressures on set. You don’t want to be unapproachable and grumpy because it drastically reduces morale and ends up affecting your final product. Practice patience and remember that all you can do is your best, and you live and learn. That all being said, you will become frustrated at some point because you’re human (aren’t you?). Just remember to apologize as soon as you can if you say something you regret—whether to your director, AC, or a PA. There’s never a good excuse for being an asshole and not apologizing.

On our shoot, I found myself forgetting this at times. I was so distracted by everything — the light was changing too fast, I underestimated shoot and prep times, we were overshooting, and all of the technical distractions like trying to get the Ronin working properly and the quickly dying camera and monitor batteries. I began to lose my temper a bit. I was a bit short with the director and producer at times, who were just doing their job in asking me questions and expressing concerns about the lighting. I don’t think anybody took it personally, but I forgot in those moments that a deep breath goes a long way in maintaining patience and reminding yourself that you’re all just trying your best to do a good job under stressful and chaotic circumstances. Better to lean in and enjoy it than let it defeat you.

5. Lighten up

As a continuance of the previous, though the schedule may be tight and the pressure high, don’t take everything so seriously. You’re making a movie, presumably because you want to. Movies are stressful to make, but they can also be fun. It’s not that big a deal to have to go for another take, or if the boom drops into the shot. If you keep a light mood it helps the others do the same and helps relax the set, which leads to a much more enjoyable time. If you’re going to be working all day, might as well make it as enjoyable as possible.

6. Communicate with the director

Keep an open channel of communication with the director.

Check in with them every so often. You should probably be talking with them almost as often as they’re speaking with the actors. If you’re not happy with how a shot went for technical reasons, make that clear. Also leave the door open for the director to come to you with their concerns or suggestions. They likely won’t be as technically adept as you so remember to speak their language, and be patient if you have to explain a shot to them. The director is responsible for the actors and the integrity of the scene, so while you may be totally satisfied with that sick dolly move which finally went right, but if your director wasn’t satisfied with the performance, you need to go again. You may also find that speaking with your director leads to those spontaneous shot ideas you left room for in your planning.

7. Have a script and shot list on hand at all times

Your shot list is a living document, meaning it will continue to change and update as you go. It’s never meant to lock you down, only to liberate you.

On our shoot, I kept mine in my back pocket. You’ll likely pull it out frequently and make notes, cross off your shots, or make minor adjustments. You can also reference any pertinent information about each shot or set up that you put on your shot list to help you set up for the next shot. The handwritten notes and records of on-set changes to shots also provide a handy reference to the editor in post. This is technically the job of the script supervisor if you’re lucky enough to have one — but if you don’t, any notes you take will be appreciated by the editor.

8. Before each scene, go over the shooting plan and order with the director, producer, and crew

If the director doesn’t call a huddle at the beginning of a shoot day, do so yourself, at least with your essential personnel. The point is to give everyone a roadmap for the day so they know what to expect, what they’ll need to do, and any anticipated challenges or concerns. It gets everybody on the same page and provides a kickoff point so nobody is left in the dark and everybody is moving in the same direction. It also reminds everybody that they’re part of a team. Leave room for anybody to voice concerns or ask questions. Ask questions yourself. This is a chance for everybody to ask those silly questions they’d otherwise be carrying around in their back pocket all day too embarrassed to ask.

9. Playback is important

“Playback” is how the director, producer, and other core creatives on the team review the footage on set. Consider setting up a video village—a station with a monitor connected to the camera—so the director can get a clear view of the take during a take. On a budget, this can be as simple as an HDMI monitor hooked up to your camera with a long HDMI cable (though cable management if your camera is mobile can become an issue). This is the ideal setup because it doesn’t require as many breaks for playback since the director will see the take as it happens. Otherwise, If you don’t have the budget for a video village, be sure to offer playback of the last couple takes to the director, even if they don’t request it. It also helps for you as DP to see playback.

The writer & director, Charlie, and I reviewing a shot in this totally candid photo.

10. Know when and what to delegate to your crew (if you’re lucky enough to have them)

As director of photography, you can be more useful handing out tasks than doing them all yourself. This doesn’t mean you’re above getting your hands dirty, but just be ready to lead when a light needs to be moved or a flag needs to be set up. Your priority is the camera and the image and you need to curate it, and the crew understands that they’re your hands. Sometimes it makes more sense for you to monitor the image while your crew adjusts the lights under your direction.

On that note, trust your crew to help you. The “f**k it I’ll do it myself” mentality isn’t usually your friend on set. Sometimes it’s hard to communicate a specific request, in which case you may need to step in and make the adjustment yourself, but don’t do so with condescension. Trust the ability of your crew, and if they’re novice or inexperienced (as you yourself may be), then be understanding of that and offer to explain to them what you meant.

Relevant story: I once tried a flight simulator with a certified pilot. We were taking off and landing a virtual 747, and at one point I asked how often the pilots use auto-pilot on long flights. He leaned over and said they use it quite often, but it comes back to human psychology—how the brain optimally handles input. If a pilot is flying a plane manually with no automatic control, they’re likely to get overloaded, stressed, and make a mistake. Let’s call that using 100% of their conscious attention—it’s unsustainable. On the other hand, if a pilot relies entirely on autopilot when available, like on a long overseas flight, they’re using very little of their conscious attention, call it 0%, and prone to boredom, complacency, and again, serious mistakes. So pilots aim for somewhere in the middle—the 40%–60% range. That’s why they might sometimes turn off autopilot when cruising to fly manually for a while, for example, so they stay stimulated, but not overloaded.

To bring this back to film, when you’re behind the camera, there are many distractions and things that will steal your attention at once. This affected me on set; the Ronin and wireless follow focus stole much of my attention as they proved finicky and distracting with frequent technical meltdowns and battery swaps. There are so many things to think about and quick decisions to make, all under the pressure of a ticking clock, and in our case, quickly shifting sunlight.

Delegating tasks to your crew spreads the load and ensures you don’t get overloaded and end up making costly mistakes or encountering decisional gridlock because there is just too much to think about. If you have one crew member double up on battery duty, then all you have to do is keep an eye on your battery level, not wonder where they are or whether they’re charged. Try to focus on operating the camera and allow your crew to move lights and modifiers based on your direction instead of always doing it yourself—that way you can focus on the image and not be distracted by grip-work. There’s a reason that departments on a film set are so compartmentalized; every task is so specific and involved that it’s hard to spread yourself over several and do a good job at each.

Also: take breaks now and then.

Our awesome camera crew setting up diffusion on an overhead porch light before a shot. Something about this looked strangely biblical to me.

11. Make yourself open to questions and concerns

As an extension of the previous, if you can maintain a certain level of stoicism behind the camera and keep an open, approachable persona, your set will run much smoother. People shouldn’t be afraid of asking a question if they’re uncertain of something. Your crew should have no qualms about approaching you with a concern or asking for clarification. If they are afraid to do so, that is at least partially your shortcoming.

12. Praise your crew when they do a good job, and accept responsibility when you mess up

Don’t be known for your reprimands or you’ll become unapproachable and miserable to work with. If your focus puller nailed the focus on that last take, give them a high five. If the boom op held the boom up high out of frame the whole time after messing it up last time, let them know they nailed it and compliment their stamina. This will just help keep up morale on set. If you need to correct something someone is doing wrong, be helpful about it, and don’t make a show of their mistake in front of everyone else or try to embarrass them. Take them aside and point out what they’re doing wrong, why it’s a problem, and how they can do it better, with an air of helpfulness.

We all mess up sometimes; gaffers, grips, directors, actors, extras, boom poles, and, yes, cinematographers. Forgive them, forgive yourself, and try again.

13. Filmmaking is a long series of fixing things that don’t go as planned

On-the-fly course correction and ingenuity are two of your best friends. You will undoubtedly be confronted with challenges, technical or otherwise, that may make or break a scene. The more technology you’re working with behind the camera (especially rental gear) the higher the likelihood of a technical failure that might mean scratching a certain shot. This means you’ll have to think on your feet and be ready to accommodate these failures. These are largely outside of your control and all you can do is adjust and move forward. You’ll have to be decisive and creative when these conundrums arise and treat them like a challenge to be solved.

Quick anecdote: While prepping gear the night before our first day of shooting, I realized that our follow focus didn’t come with lens gears (oh no!). Without lens gears, there’s no way for the follow focus motor to grip and spin the focus ring on the lens. With so much of the shot list relying on the Ronin and, therefore, the follow focus, I couldn’t fathom how we were going to shoot the next day—in just a matter of hours. I spoke candidly with the director and told him the situation, and we commiserated until two in the morning, considering all our options, when we decided to postpone that morning’s planned 7AM shoot to the afternoon, hoping we’d figure it out.

It felt ridiculous to postpone the shoot because of something so small, but I didn’t know what else to do until I gave it more thought. Without gears, I’d need to find another way to get the follow focus to grip the lens—the only way I could think of was through friction. I had a tub of elastic bands at home, so in a Hail Mary attempt, I wound some around my focus ring and around the follow focus gear, and much to my surprise and delight, it actually worked, despite being a bit finicky. We used them for the whole shoot without any major problems.

14. Keep an eye on your battery level and data usage

This seems obvious, but if you’re unsure whether you can make it another take because of power shortage or card space, call for a battery or card change. It sucks when a great take is ruined by an avoidable technical issue like a dead battery. Also, make sure you have enough batteries (at least three for your camera), enough chargers, and a designated DIT to regularly make backups of your cards. This is another reason to have an organized gear station on set, where batteries and spare cards can have a designated space. Also, a labeling system to indicate which are empty/full or charged/dead will save a lot of time and frustration (red and green masking tape work well for this).

15. Establish a pre-take checklist ritual to get your gear ready

Before pilots take off, they go through an extensive checklist to ensure everything is in working order and ready to go for a flight. Fuel levels, check. Wing flaps, working. Instruments, check. This prevents catastrophe. While a film set is a bit less live or die (though it sometimes feels that way), many mishaps can be avoided by simply taking a moment to go through a checklist. Make a habit of going over your settings. Check your frame rate, shutter speed, ISO, and even aspect ratio or frame size. Who knows, maybe the last time the camera was rented it was set to 720p 60fps and not changed back, or you accidentally hit a button that changed your picture profile or some other setting.

Also, have a white piece of paper on hand and check for dust on the lens or sensor before filming. I made the mistake of not doing this, couldn’t make out any debris on the small LCD monitor on the day, and only in post noticed a couple asshole specks of dust right there near the center of some vital shots. This embarrassing blunder could have been simply avoided by cleaning my sensor and lens before shooting that day, or checking the shot against a white wall or piece of paper which would make the dust more visible.

16. Rehearse your camera moves ad nauseum

If you have any complicated camera moves (tracking shots on a gimbal, dolly moves, jib moves, etc) make sure you’ve budgeted time to rehearse them, and use that rehearsal time wisely. Whether you roll on rehearsal is up to the director, but you need to make sure your path is clear, that you’ve set up your focus points, and that the actors know their marks and where you’re going to be. You probably won’t nail a tricky camera move the first take, but you’ll make your chances a lot better if you take the time to practice ahead of time. Speaking of…

17. Humour your focus puller

If somebody volunteers to be your focus-puller, they’re a brave soul. Focus-pulling is one of the trickiest jobs on set. It takes a lot of experience to get good at hitting the focus points and reacting to real-time camera movements. They may need a couple extra run-throughs of the movement to get their focus points set. It’s worth allowing them this time to ensure you get, as our producer would say, “iceberg lettuce” focus. Crisp.

18. Your shot list is your bible but don’t take it as gospel

You may find that when you set up a shot you’ve written on your shot list, it just doesn’t look right. Maybe the lighting is different than you thought, or the placement of the actors has changed, or a light broke and now your wide angle doesn’t work. You need to improvise. It’s okay to adjust a shot on your shot list on the day. Just make sure that before you do this you think about the edit — be aware of the axis, for example, and your coverage. Don’t mess up the geography of the scene. However, there is usually room to play around with your shots a bit to get it right. It’s different when you actually see the shot in front of you vs. imagining it ahead of time.

O n our last night of shooting, we wrapped most of the cast and crew before filming our last scene, which only required a few hands on deck. We had a wrap dinner to unwind a bit, and we were totally pooped from the whole weekend of filming with so little sleep. But we still had one scene left to shoot. We were all a bit on edge and too exhausted to be completely alert. We hesitantly got back to work for one last scene, and as I set up for the first shot—a wide—something didn’t feel right. The framing was atrocious, the lighting was bad, the composition just sucked. The director and I just looked at each other in bewilderment. Neither of us knew how to get this shot to work, but we both hated it. We did what we could but eventually just settled for a take and moved on. We might as well have nixed it—the shot sucked. Sometimes you have a shot on paper but in the real world it just doesn’t work. You might not have time for it, you might be way too exhausted to make it work, or it might just not play out as you had imagined. If you can adapt to make the shot work, that’s ideal. Sometimes, though, the best solution is to accept that it’s not working and move on.