Shot Planning Toolkit

I needed to shoot three hours of raw footage on a basketball court for The Man From Tomorrow, an AI cinematic project — fourteen setups, from a simple hero walk to a back-to-camera turn that had to land exactly right. The person operating the camera had never done this kind of work before, and I wasn't going to have time to re-explain each setup, twice, in the dark, between takes.

The constraint

No crew, one evening, and a checklist that had to survive being read off a phone screen standing on a court after sunset — by someone who'd get maybe thirty seconds of instruction before each shot.

Use it

Three pages, each earning a different job rather than three versions of the same thing:

Move at Half Speed is the one rule underneath every shot, demonstrated rather than described — a looping side-by-side of natural pace against the half-speed that actually reads as cinematic, and the roll/action/hold rhythm every take follows.

Court Storyboard is the working document: all fourteen shots as cards — starting position, camera movement, my movement, framing, timing, takes — each with a small looping top-down diagram of the motion, and a checkbox that persists locally so the list stays honest about what's actually done.

The Court Briefing turns the same fourteen shots into something closer to a video: autoplaying, vertical-framed to match the phone footage itself, captions timed like subtitles, with play/pause and a scrubber — a version you watch once before you start, rather than read.

Where it breaks

Three formats for one shoot was probably one too many going in — I built all of them before ever standing on the court to find out which one we'd actually reach for. In practice the storyboard did the real work; the briefing mostly repeated it in a slower format. Next time: build the checklist first, run the shoot, and only add a second format if the first one visibly fails on set.