Pre-Production is Planning

Pre-Production is the first of the Seven Stages of Production. It’s where we collect ideas, write scripts and outlines, and plan for our productions.

Note taking is a big part of this phase. If we don’t capture our ideas quickly, we risk losing them.

In the digital realm, you need a note taking tool that accepts many types of media, and syncs across all your devices.

Evernote is my go to for this colossal task. I’ve come to trust it for almost a decade and have gathered almost 15,000 notes as of late 2019.

Stop the Idea Overwhelm By Staying Organized

With so many ideas at hand, you have to find ways to organize your notes and scripts and outlines. Check out the video and the transcription below for more details.

Please Enjoy This Imperfect Transcription by the Robots at Otter.ai

As storytellers we love ideas. In order for us to keep getting ideas, we have to capture them, we have to collect them.

So in this episode of StoryTechWorks, I want to talk about pre production, which is one of the phases one of the seven phases of production.

The seven Ps, I call it, is a system that helps you get more comfortable and feel self assured that you are following all the steps is a very logical sequential system that helps you get your productions done and make sure you understand every step and you’re not missing in every steps.

We, as storytellers, one of the risks that we take is that we, we either miss out on our idea collection because we don’t capture an idea When you have it, and then if you don’t write it down or get it into some kind of system immediately, it could be gone forever.

So you need a good system that collects things. And the other thing is you want to be able to have an organized system.

So pre production is planning, it’s writing, it’s scripting. It’s, it’s such a huge topic. It’s one of my favorite things. But pre production is just so huge and without a system that helps you collect and organize ideas, it can be really difficult.

So paper is good. I’ve got my always carrying around a notebook. I’ve got a notebook that comes with its own little telescoping pin. I’ll show you how that works and another video, but you want to get your ideas organized.

And a great way to do it is to put it into a digital brain. My favorite digital brain is Evernote. Many of you familiar with me Evernote, it is a great digital database that lives in the cloud.

It is available on your mobile iPad desktop. It’s everywhere you lots of apps send good content to Evernote. So if you haven’t checked it out, I really encourage you, if you have it, you’re not using it.

Here’s a tip. You can send it tons of stuff. And you can always find what you need by using unique keywords.

A unique keyword is a word that is unique to a particular project, meaning it’s not a real word, so you can search for it. And it’s only going to show up where you want it to.

For example, in this series, as I call it StoryTechWorks, my unique key word is STW. That’s not a real word. Even though those letters are probably used in other words, but that’s okay. It seems to work for me.

So it’s one of those unique keywords words that I use. Let’s see. Another one I use is, for example, this Seven Ps, just simply 7P, that’s a unique keyword.

So for this particular project that I’m working on it, I use two unique keywords. So if I search for them both, and I’m only going to be getting my story tech works projects, that has to do with the seven piece now if I use p one, like I used earlier that I know that P one is pre production.

So that’s just an example of one of the many systems you can use to make storytelling easier, make it more fun. I love systems like this. I love technology. That’s one of the reasons I love online storytelling.

Some of the other piece that will cover in the 7 Ps system. So we’ve got pre production, we’ve got production, that’s what I’m doing now. Recording, we’ve got post production, I’ll do that in a minute with editing.

Then I’ve got publishing then I’ve got promotion, and then finally proofing and then the seventh P is this process.

I just love the creative process. I love thinking and talking about processes and sharing those processes with you. So if you found that to be helpful, let me know.

I’m David Bourne. You can find me at New Wild Media.com and I hope to see you out there on the ‘Net.

Cheers.

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