Rule #1 - request a shot list
The eight columns that stand between you and six unpaid rounds of amends. The most valuable page in the book.
11 minute read · one activity · lesson 15 of 21
If you take one thing from this course, take this. Before the brief, before you draw anything, request a shot list to run parallel to the script.
A script tells you what happens. A shot list tells you what the camera sees. The gap between those two things is where every miserable, unpaid, endlessly-revised storyboard job in history has lived.
The eight columns
- Shot number - #1
- Camera angle - CU
- Camera note - Handycam
- Location - EXT Stadium Night
- Talent - Quarterback
- Action / frame description - Eyes furrowed brow, reflection of lights
- Script / prompt - The QB snaps the play, looking to throw the ball
- Director notes - We can see his eyes, reflecting helmet face cage & team logo
Why this specific document, and not a conversation
Look at the example above. If all you had been given was 'eyes, furrowed brow, reflection of lights', how many completely different, completely reasonable frames could you draw? Twenty? Nineteen of them are wrong, and you will draw one of those nineteen, and it will not be your fault, and you will still be the one redrawing it.
That is the whole argument. The shot list does not constrain your creativity - it aims it.
What to do when they cannot provide one
This is where the book turns a problem into revenue. If the client cannot supply a shot list, request the additional TIME to create one - and charge for it.
The reasoning is watertight and you should be able to say it out loud: producing the shot list is the director's job, not the artist's. You are paid to produce a visual product. If you are also doing the directing, that is a second service.
And it is genuinely in their interest: making the list takes a fraction of the time it takes to draw everything and then change it all in week three.
The diagnostic hiding inside the request
Here is the part that will save your career. If the client cannot give you a shot list, it very probably means there is no director attached yet.
And that tells you exactly what kind of job you have just been offered: 'if you have only been provided with a script, and a look-and-feel brief with no specific director's shot list - you are in for a sticky transaction with many updates.'
That is not a reason to refuse the work. It is a reason to price it differently, and to say so before you start.
“Producers may require you to fill these gaps… if this is the case quote a price to additionally create this 'shot list' document as you see the production.”
- Mitchell James Hughes, Storyboard Art
Write the shot list they did not send you
Do the director's job once, deliberately, so that you know exactly what you are charging for when you offer it as a service.
- Take the scene you thumbnailed on Day 14.
- Build the eight-column table. Every column, every row. No blanks - if you do not know the camera note, you have found a question for the director.
- Fill in a row for every single shot. Be honest about how long this takes you. Time it.
- Now count: how many QUESTIONS did the exercise generate? Those questions are what a real client would otherwise have discovered in week three via a re-draw.
- Finally, price it: at your day rate (Day 4), what would you charge to produce this document as a standalone service?
What you should have at the end
A completed eight-column shot list, a list of questions for the director, and a price for producing one. That price is a new revenue line most artists never think to sell.
Day 15 in one line
Request the shot list. If they cannot provide one, there is probably no director - so charge for building it, and expect more amends.
This course is free and stays free. If you want to board in the suite Mitchell James Hughes built for his own work - script, shot list, storyboard, animatic, AI artist - the free tier opens every app with no card.
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