If your DP and you haven’t shot something, with purpose, prior to your first day on set you’re obviously going to have a number of rough moments at the start. Now when I say ‘with purpose’ I mean something that is on a schedule and is aiming at a final product. Think a short or a commercial venture, that is it’s own thing.

I had a cinematography duo, who worked well with each other, knew each other’s eye and had long practiced shorthand between them. It took about a day and a half for them and me to get on the same page. Of course our first day on set was not our first day together. We had numerous meetings during pre-production; we had prep days on set to check lighting and blocking; we even shot a teaser trailer for our initial crowd funding campaign (though there wasn’t a ton of interaction on that day for various reasons). But we had never been next to each other on a live set where one of us says ‘rolling’ and the other says ‘action’. The rhythm that gets established in that situation can’t be rushed or faked. And when you’re working with a fraction of the budget, and a fraction of the time, that a more established production team might have, that connection makes or breaks a shoot.

Your roles before that first day on set are similar, but that period doesn’t give you the proper feel for what it will be like when you’re on the clock and lunch is coming up and you got a location move after the next shot. Those moments of on set understanding between you (and this goes for other department heads) is what greases the wheels.

Did the product, what we put on film, suffer because we were learning each others’ short hand on that first day? Maybe, but maybe not. The schedule surely suffered though. We wound up hours behind, simply because of miscommunication, but also explaining too much sometimes only to realize we were all talking about the same thing. And we had an insanely tight schedule to begin with (come back in the coming weeks to read ‘An Insane Man’s Schedule‘ post).

So find a simple one day shoot to work on, that has solid stakes. Something you both actually want to see made. It doesn’t have to be complicated or anything, just something that makes you truly fill the roles you’ll be playing on your feature’s first day.