About ShotCraft Studio
ShotCraft Studio is a small production studio that plans and shoots short-form video for brands and independent creators. The guides on this site are the templates and rules we apply to paid work.
How it started
For years our shot lists, boards and schedules lived in a shared folder and were rewritten for every project. They were internal, unglamorous and extremely effective: a good plan consistently produced a better edit than a bigger camera did.
We started publishing them because clients and freelance collaborators kept asking to keep copies. Since then the documents have been written out in full, tested on shoots with two people and with six, and simplified until a first-time creator can use them alone.
What we believe
These principles come from productions that went well and from the ones that did not.
The value of a plan is that it removes decisions you would otherwise make while holding a camera and watching the light change.
A printed list and a pencil survive rain, dead batteries and broken apps. Nothing we publish requires a subscription.
Any shot you cannot repeat needs an alternative recorded in advance, and any file you cannot copy twice does not exist.
Planning method
We write the one-line promise with the client before anything else, and it never survives a change without the plan being rewritten.
Four to six beats are mapped on one sheet. This is the stage where most ideas are dropped, and it is the cheapest stage to drop them in.
Every beat gets a wide and a detail as a minimum, plus a clean plate for the location and a backup for anything unrepeatable.
The list is reordered by location and light. What is not scheduled is not planned, and what is not planned usually does not get filmed.
Editorial desk
Guides are written by the people who plan the shoots and reviewed by the people who assemble the footage. Both halves of the process have to agree before a page is published.
Producer
Responsible for the shot list and schedule method, and for keeping the templates realistic for small crews.
Editor
Checks that the recommended coverage actually gives an editor enough material to build a sequence.
Studio lead
Reviews every page for accuracy and keeps the internal templates and the published guides aligned.
Contact
Send us the brief, the deadline and what has to be filmed. If it matches what we do, we will tell you how we would plan it.