Pre-production

Pre-production is where a video is cheapest to change. Rewriting a paragraph costs a minute, reshooting a scene costs a day, and repairing a structural fault in the edit costs a weekend and usually fails anyway. The work covers idea selection, research, scripting, sketching the packaging, booking anybody who needs to be there, and a shot list so nothing turns out to be missing at the edit stage. Solo creators skip it most often and pay for skipping it most often. Writing down what each shot has to achieve before you set up the camera is the habit that pays here.