Speaker 1: If you like the video, please consider supporting us on Patreon. Script continuity notes, circle tape sheets, footage logs. I got into filmmaking to make films, not do paperwork. There seem to be quite a few forms that deal with filmmaking, but which of them are actually important during a production shoot and why? We're going to show you. Welcome to Pull My Focus, adventures in the world of digital filmmaking, where we give you the inside tips you need to make great video. If you do a search online for filmmaking production forms, you'll find a ton of them. Just on No Film School's blog, they have a list with 99 forms. Now, yeah, a bunch of them are duplicates, variations on the form, but also a lot of them have to deal with producing feature films. But if you're a filmmaker making short films and videos, a content creator on YouTube, are any of these forms really relevant to you during a production shoot? Yes, and those are the ones dealing with notes. Lots of notes. During production, it's important to take notes for these three main reasons. The most obvious is continuity. We shoot scripts and even scenes out of sequence. Was her hair down or up for that shot? Did she spin clockwise or did she spin counterclockwise? Reshoots and additional shots. It's easy for us to edit during the production phase, and that means we can fulfill on the need for doing reshoots or adding additional shots. So having certain information about the camera and lighting setup can really be crucial. And last but not least, notes for post-production, like circle takes for the editor and director. While shooting, you may remember why you made a certain decision during a shot, but days or even weeks later during the edit, you're just not going to remember. There are three areas we want to focus on for our note-taking. One is the subject, which are people, props, and places. The second is the lights that light them, and the third is the camera that records it all. The first form is one of the most important, and that's the script supervisor sheet, sometimes called script supervisor notes or circle take sheet. It actualizes the shot list. You know, that really long list that you thought you would get through in one day, no problem? Well, it shows what you actually shot, which is more important to the editor than what you wanted to shoot. There are many versions of the sheet. You can find tons of them online. I'm going to talk about additional information that I put into mine. Record the scene number if you have one. For YouTube and shorts, a lot of times, like for our stuff, there's only one scene, so we don't do scene numbers. Then the shot number and the take number. If it's not a bad take, but not a great take, don't do anything. If it's a good take, circle it, hence the name circle takes. I like to mark down why it was a circle take or if there was something about it that particularly stands out. If it was no good at all, because maybe you had to stop in the middle of a shot, then mark it NG for no good. And action or rehearsal. That's great. Yep, sure is. Well, it looks like the... I like to mark a note why it was NG, because this shot might have captured something that other circle takes didn't. For example, if it was NG because you stopped in the middle of the take, the beginning of the take might actually be good. There might be something there that the editor can use. Circle takes and NG markings were important when shooting film, because you didn't want to make prints of the NG takes to save money, obviously. In the digital age, it's just data storage. If you can save the data, save all of those takes. Just throw them in a separate bin, because you never know, there might be some gold in there that the editor can use. NG marking is PU for pick-up shot. If you have a series of really good circle takes on a long shot, but there's one line or action that you're just not happy with and you want to do over, instead of redoing the whole thing, you could just do a pick-up of just that line or action. It can save time and money. It can force the editor's hand a little bit if they really do have to use that take, because you don't have a lot of breathing room on either side, but it saves a lot of time on set from having to redo a whole long take over and over again. If you did that pick-up or another shot over and over again without cutting, over and over again without cutting, over and over again without cutting, that's called a series and mark that. In the notes section, I mark continuity notes. What to look for? Did anything during the shot or the scene change? Can an actress let their hair down or put it up? Did something come in or out? Did the actor pick up a piece of paper with their left hand or their right? Back in the day, Polaroids were king. Everyone on set had them, script supervisors, hair and makeup, sets and props, and they were all taking Polaroids and marking them up for reference. But this is the digital age. Your shots are also a record and relatively easy to access, but it's also a good idea to have separate and easier to reference stills that you can keep all in one place. So take your own Polaroids using whatever camera you want, just as long as it's easy for you to attach notes to them like scene or shot number, character name, et cetera, and keep them in one place that's easy to reference. For the camera, we want to record the common lens and exposure data. Focal length, ISO, f-stop, frames per second, and what filters used, if any. On small productions, I record all this information on the script supervisor sheet. I like to just keep it all in one place. There's one additional number to record that I bet you didn't think of, and that is the camera height. If you've ever tried to recreate a shot from a screen grab, you know it's a real pain. The parallax between the foreground and background is off. Having the camera height makes it a cinch. How do you measure it? From the ground to the center of the lens, not to the bottom of the camera or the top of the tripod. You may also want to record the distance to your subject to make it even easier to reset up a shot. If it's talent, you want to measure it to their eye. With lighting notes, we're more concerned with setups. A setup is a lighting setup that may have multiple shots. You might have a medium-wide shot and then punch in for a close-up. You may tweak the lights just a little bit, but for the most part, it's one lighting setup where the camera's looking in one direction. Gaffers vary on the type of notes that they take. It might be lighting diagrams and detail or pictures. But the one most important number that will help them recreate a shot besides the actual exposure reading is knowing the contrast ratio for each character. The contrast ratio is between key and fill, and we cover that in detail in our video on lighting daylight interiors. But basically what it is is you're taking, instead of just an overall reading, you're actually blocking your fill in order to get your key reading, and then blocking the key to get your fill reading, and then comparing those two readings. If your key is double your fill, that's a two-to-one ratio. On small productions, I keep the contrast ratio information on the script supervisor notes as well. What is the best way to record all this info? It totally depends on how you like to work on set. Quick and easy recording is tantamount, as you don't have a lot of time on set, you don't want to be distracted by all this note-taking. But you also want to be able to easily send this information to your editor. As I've shown on short projects, I like to use paper and just the script continuity sheet, and I can keep everything I need there. But the caveat is I do afterwards have to write up those notes in a readable format and send them to the editor. Some of you might be screaming, what about this slate? Yes, you can put information on the slate, and we've been using DigiSlate for a little while, which is a free slate, but I just started testing out Movie Slate 8. It's $29.99, it's very customizable, and what's great is afterwards I can email myself a log that can be input into Final Cut or for us into Premiere. We haven't tested any of that yet, so we're going to do that and let you know how that works out. But what's great is I'm already using an iPad slate, and I can add a lot of info there. Another thing that's really cool is I can get a second screen that it flashes for a split second that has a lot of extra info. Some of what I mentioned, like the camera height, distance to the subject, and other customizable information, whatever it is that I want to add. If you do want to use paper forms, where can you get them? We'll put a list in the description, but also check the companion article with this video that'll be on our site on PullMyFocus.tv, and we'll put some of our forms there. So that's some of the more important notes that we feel you should take during production. Let us know if you think we missed something or if you want more information in the comments below. Thanks for watching. Hit the subscribe button and also that bell button that YouTube added for some reason so that you can make sure you get notifications when our new videos come out. And if you find what we're doing helpful and informative, consider backing us on Patreon. With a small monthly pledge, you're investing in our ability to continue to bring you great insight tips for making great video. Thank you. This is our obligatory kitten shot for our editor, Gali. Yeah? Yeah? This is Maisie. Maisie, Maisie, look. Maisie, look. Maisie, look. Maisie, look. Maisie. Maisie, look at the camera. Maisie. Maisie. Maisie.