You are standing on the set, by the camera, on the first day of shooting. The world seems to have gone mad around you, with everyone busy rushing round, attending to their own concerns. At what point do you start to do your job and begin taking notes?
Write What you Can When you Can
You should start to take notes as soon as possible. The order in which things will happen will vary, but you should make it a rule to write down what you can when you can and always be alert to what is going on around you.
If you are working on a production where continuity is of great importance, you should never leave the set when shots are being discussed, set up, rehearsed and recorded. You should not retire to a little room, set aside for your purposes, in order to type up yesterday’s continuity sheets. If you do, you will not be able to keep up with what is happening today.
Although it would be helpful to watch a rehearsal without taking any notes, you might find that you then don’t have enough time to take sufficient notes later on. You will never be able to write down all you want and you should use every second available.
Pens or Pencils?
Do you make notes using pencil or coloured pen? There are two options open to you, both with advantages and disadvantages.
First, always take rehearsal notes in pencil. That way, you can alter your notes as things change. If you continue to use pencil when shooting, you should make sure that you can distinguish the different takes, perhaps by writing in ‘take 1’ and ‘take 2’ beside the notes. The advantage of continuing to use pencil is that you can erase wrong or altered notes and your script remains fairly clean and legible. The disadvantage lies in being unable to differentiate between rehearsal notes and notes relating to the recording, unless you are very careful.
You will not have this problem if you use coloured pens for your notes when recording. The difficulty with this system lies with the director who shoots a number of takes of each angle. You will need a good colour-code system to remember that pink relates to take 12, and the danger is that your script will become excessively messy and hard to read.
‘You should not retire to a little room, set aside for your purpose.’