Through experience, I learned the importance of Pre-production

Long back when I started taking interest in film making, I read an event about a famous film maker though I don’t remember exactly the name of that film maker but I think it was Alfred Hitchcock. The event was “once was Alfred Hitchcock was having lunch in a restaurant and a fan of Alfred Hitchcock arrived there. He saw Alfred Hitchcock and asked him when is your next film coming? Alfred Hitchcock replied everything is done only the shoot is left”. If we see the film making process it has 3 stages. Pre production, production and post production. But the interesting thing about the above mentioned event is that after completing the pre production Alfred Hitchcock though that all the work is done and only shoot is left.

When I had read this even I got idea about the importance of pre production but it was actually the practical experience which showed me how honest Alfred Hitchcock ‘s statement was. Recently we finished a 30 minutes film for the final project of our college. And no doubt I learned the importance of pre production. We had the final script in our hands but we didn’t concentrated on story boarding and other important elements of pre production like shoot plan and production script.

I also learned that we should give maximum time to the final script in professional career. Due to the time limit we had to make a script and get it approved by our teacher, so the first concept was refused and then we had to develop another concept which was accepted but now we had less time so we were shooting and creating more situations and details for the rest of the film. So the situation was completely identical to the current Pakistani Film Industry where scripts are written on the spot. This taught us that maximum time should be given to the script. Don’t know when I will be doing my next project but that’s for sure this time I will be giving more time to pre production. After all I will not have a dead line to meet from a teacher J