You Want Me to Make Content About Making Content? Okay Buddy, Here's Some Content About That.
Written by Luke
August 21, 2023
Content. It's everywhere. It's hip. It's insidious. It could even be in the room with us right now.
Did John Carpenter really achieve anything with In the Mouth of Madness since he didn't leverage several 5-part TikTok series about the creation of each individual shot? Ok, I'll stop.
Seriously though, all media has gone fully meta. Smoke and mirrors surrounding the production of anything has gone out the window as fans are chomping at the bit for well edited footage of Marc Ruffalo eating gyro in his downtime.
For Margaretfest 2023, we went in with a plan to capture all the necessary media we needed to leverage content across different accounts and final products.
Going in with a clear picture of what we needed to shoot was essential. Even more essential was going over the deliverables and seeing how assets could be leveraged across final products to cut down the scope of what we needed to shoot. We were shooting for the @madebycounter Instagram and YouTube accounts as well as the @navaonti Instagram and future music video releases.
Overall the show as well as the shoot was plenty successful due to this pre-production planning. However, some of our best work was spontaneous. We ended up producing a series of stories using footage and photos of all the other performers, tagging them, and reaching a wider audience when they reposted our content. We hadn't originally planned to do any of that, but the simple pivot to film a couple minutes of each performance built a ton of strong connections and bolstered our reputation.
So, while at counter one of our core tenants is simply "PRE-PRODUCTION":
it is incredibly important in filmmaking and media production in general to be able to pivot and embrace spontaneity. Filming all the behind the scenes shots can't really be planned it just has to happen on the spot.
The pre-production in that context, however, comes from building the skills, awareness, and toolkit to rapidly setup, shoot, and teardown.