My Directors Notebook

After speaking to my tutor we thought it would be better to show pictures of what is in my directors notebook for a few reasons. The first is that it is very thin, as we only had one day of production, and secondly as I would also be using it document my process as a director for the semester two major project, which we had already started doing.

I chose to use an A5 sized book because it's easy to carry around and whip out, I did originally want something A6 but after having a look I deemed it too small.

So the first page in my notebook was a breakdown of what every role needed to bring with them on our production day. I personally love lists as it's a lot easier for me to keep track of everything that's happening both individually and as a whole when I spoke to each crew member before the shoot. 

These pages were from our day of production, and though it started off very organised it ended up being a little haphazard, which is fine for me as I of course understand my own though process but as a body of work it would need a bit of annotation to make head or tail of it.
1. At the top under the heading: 1:30/1:45 refers to the time we would start filming, as that is when our actor was due to arrive
2. Breakdown of shots, in what order we intended to film, based on producer/cinematographer thoughts, especially because of the varying lighting changes if we had filmed chronologically. This way was decidedly more time efficient.
3. The crossed out numbers were me breaking down the shots that aligned with the morning and the evening, as well as noting how many additional close ups we had to do before we changed the lighting to move on to the evening shots. I noted which ones we purposely skipped/altered for when time was fast spent. This would be useful for the editor when it came to putting everything together. This continues at the top of the second page.
4. Jotted at the top 5:30-6:30 is the time that we had to be finished for as the actor needed to leave.
5. The reference to neighbours/house-mates was something that I asked the actor to add to the script as at the time of filming we could hear conversation and movement from the people above us, and it went on for quite some time. This then meant that if it proceeded we could make an excuse for it early on in the story.
6. The list of costumes I had to jot down because, we had no art director and secondly because towards the end I had planned on interlacing certain outfits to show the delusional state of the characters mind.
7.There were a number of things we had to adapt to because of the location change and scene 7 shot 22 was in reference to that. I wrote it down not only for our benefit but for the editor.

I didn't get to meet with the editor as often as I liked for various reasons on their part but when we did meet I kept a list of the suggestions I had made and changes that needed to be implemented so that I could confirm that they had been made when we were to meet up again.


This is all that was in my notebook. As stated when I researched into the content of a directors notebook everyone works very differently. As well as this I had the shot list and marked up script with me on the day and often made notes, or ticked things off on their as well.  For me personally a directors notebook is where you can keep track of certain thoughts during the shooting process that either help you keep organised or creatively expand on what you can have.