foreign [Music] now we are moving on to probably the most important process of this entire pre-production which is the location scouting process and generally there's two different ways this is going to happen and one is much more common than the other especially now how times are changing but you're either going to be scouting them physically so you're actually going to go to the location more often than not you're going to go with the director and the locations manager and maybe the producer but really just those two the other way to do it which is the
common way to do it is you're going to do it over Zoom you're going to get Stills in Dropbox the location manager is going to send them to you they're going to get passed around the director everybody's going to get a save producer there'll be one main folder that you go to you look at the Stills and then you chime in at this stage especially if you're doing the not the physical one so you're looking at just photos really important if there are any red flags that you chime in before anybody else because what is
going to happen is every department is going to have their pros and cons for certain locations and if you don't get them in if you aren't the squeaky wheel those will get railroaded you'll get just get run over and by the time you do chime in it'll already be too late you've gone past the point of no return they've shown them to the clients the clients really love them and then you find yourself in the back seat basically and that is not where you want to be so you want to be if anything in this
section talking about location scouting process if you take anything away from it take away the speed idea get your ideas in as fast as you can be as proactive as you can in getting the location that you want especially on a commercial like this because this is day exterior this is 100 the look of the commercial will come down to the location and then the next important thing is the schedule relative to the location so absolutely Paramount that you are on the ball when the location scouting process comes along either way whether it's Stills which
is you know not my preferred because generally you have to go in between someone to talk with the director I mean you can go back and forth with the director over email or have that Zoom call but really if you're there on the day you'll be able to spot things that the location manager might have missed the person whoever they send out whether it's the PA or somebody like that to get the Stills you'll be able to do a whole lot more if you're actually on the ground there the problem is that that very rarely
happens because they got to pay you to go out there some production companies they just you come on too late and the process has already started so you got to play catch-up but very rare that you physically get to go out there but that is changing slowly but surely with all of the new protocols that are in place for health and safety uh sometimes you get out there a little bit earlier which can be nice so this section is all about what to do we're going to go through both options so I'm going to show
you an example of how I would look at this job if it was through Stills that are in Dropbox or something like that a shared folder then we're actually going to go out to the location uh like we would with the director and the location manager and just take a look take a look at some of the different angles and decide what is going to be the most beneficial because there's always in commercial cinematography there's always tiers that you have to take into account or tranches different tranches where you have to say Okay this is
my number one preferred location it doesn't work for anybody else for parking for crew for art department but from a cinematographer's point of view this is number one and then you have number two which sort of is general and works for everybody but it's not as good as for you as number one so you just have to break them down into these groups and very rarely will you will everybody be getting their number one pick right the director may have one idea you might have one idea that producer might have another idea so it's just
breaking them down and realizing okay what are the pros and cons with each of these and can I deal with the cons in each of these right the pros you can always deal with but the cons is it so bad that we can't come back from it or does the director need to know that we can't do a b or c because of a location like this so really important now is the time to communicate quick come with a story which we're going to talk about in the next section and it really is the process
that will once you go once you decide there's no going back right so this is very important that you be on your A game when it comes to the location scouting process
