Representing The Real – Pre-Production
Representing The RealThe pre-production process for our documentary on Julie and Samye Ling was perhaps the most work-intensive aspect of production. It took a lot of administrative work to organise the documentary shoot, and many, many emails and phone calls to finally reach Julie and Ani Sonam (Buddhist nun at Samye Ling) and decide a shooting schedule.
For our documentary project, I ended up as both director and producer which was interesting to balance and manage, but taught me a lot about both roles through sheer trial and error. I think my strength as a filmmaker lies in the head of department (HOD) roles, as I’m naturally inclined towards leadership and enjoy both project and people management and creative processes.
A lesson learnt from the pre-production process was the need for organisation, persistence, and timing. There were a few weeks when I didn’t think we would get anywhere with the proposed idea and weren’t hearing much back, but with continued efforts it worked out in the end. Given how close we came to aborting the idea altogether, it taught me to stick with something even if it seems unlikely because oftentimes in life we quit just as we’re about to succeed and make a breakthrough.
Once we had the specific time for our interviews with Julie and time periods we could visit Samye Ling, we had to book accommodation, arrange travel, and book out equipment. In addition to this we also had to create an itinerary, do equipment checks, make audio-visual checklists, etc. This was all done prior to the documentary shoot and in my opinion helped immensely and kept us on track, and allowed us to get everything we needed over the two days.
With each pre-production process for a project I find I learn something new, and find a better way of doing things in order to make production and post-production run efficiently and smoothly. Obviously you can’t account for every scenario and things do go off-course or require problem-solving, but I think a significant element of filmmaking is identifying a problem and finding a creative solution and opportunity within that.