Media Production - Getting Started

Your teacher has just assigned a media project and given you a deadline for when the final project is due, what do you do now?

I have seen many students have a confused look on their faces, or worse, a look of panic and anxiety. In this post, I will offer you some concrete ways to get on track to produce an effective media project.

Media production is separated by 3 stages of production:

1. Pre-Production
2. Production
3. Post-Production

Obviously, you can't have any production without these 3 stages, but I would argue that your project lives or dies based upon the work you do in stage 1- Pre-Production.

What happens in this most important stage?

Pre-production is where all the planning, writing, scripting, and important production questions should be asked and answered. This is the right time to pull out those tried and true journalism 5 "W"s:

1. Who? Who is the audience? 
2. What? What is your approach?
3. Where? What locations are needed to tell this story?
4. When? When (and How) will you be shooting your story?
5. Why? Why is your approach interesting to your audience? Why do I want to watch?

These are not all the questions you should be thinking about, but they do give you a starting place to begin planning your project.

If there is one main concept to always keep in mind, a "Prime Directive", it would be "Who is the target audience?" The answer to this question will guide your approach, your script, and your storytelling.

If you want a great example of a major film production fail, check out the documentary Lost in La Mancha (2003). This award winning film documents the failed attempt of director Terry Gilliam to bring his vision of the Don Quixote story to the big screen.  There are many factors that contributed to the film's production failure, but certainly a very short pre-production schedule was one major cause.