How to plan a shot list in 20 minutes

Most shot lists fail in the same direction: they're too long, too vague, or both. The director writes 'wide shot of office' on a line, shows up, and discovers there are six ways to shoot a wide shot of an office and they don't know which one they want. By the time they figure it out, the natural light has moved.

This is the 20-minute method I use for explainer-style shoots. It produces a list that's both short enough to actually finish and specific enough to actually direct.

The 20-minute clock

The clock starts when you have a script in hand. If you don't have a script - even a rough one - you're not building a shot list, you're building a wishlist. Step zero is to finish the script first.

With a script, the 20 minutes break down:

• 0:00–0:03 - Read the script once. Mark every concrete noun.
• 0:03–0:10 - Decide which nouns become shots.
• 0:10–0:15 - Decide what kind of shot each one is.
• 0:15–0:20 - Sort and trim.

If you finish in 12, the script wasn't dense enough. If you blow past 25, you're overthinking individual shots.

Step 1 - Mark the concrete nouns

A concrete noun is something you can point a camera at. "Coffee" is concrete. "Innovation" is not. "The grinder" is concrete. "Quality" is not.

Go through the script and highlight every concrete noun. Don't worry about whether you can actually shoot each one - just mark them. A typical 60-second explainer has 30–50 concrete nouns; a 3-minute explainer has 80–120.

Step 2 - Promote nouns to shots

Now make the cut. Most nouns aren't going to become shots; they're either too generic ("a person", "the screen") or already covered by a wider shot. The shots you actually need are the ones the script depends on visually.

A useful filter: if the audience can imagine the noun perfectly from context, don't shoot it. "I poured the coffee" probably doesn't need a shot of pouring coffee - they can see it in their head. "I poured it through a Chemex" might, because Chemex is a specific object the audience might not know.

You're aiming for one shot per 2–4 seconds of finished video. For a 60-second piece, that's 15–30 distinct shots. Fewer than 15 and the video will feel slide-show-y. More than 30 and you're cutting too fast for a one-minute explainer.

Step 3 - Assign shot types

For each shot on your list, pick the type. This is the bit most lists skip and then regret on set.

The shorthand I use:

• WS - wide / Establishing Shot
• MS - medium
• CU - close-up
• ECU - extreme close-up
• OTS - over-the-shoulder
• POV - point-of-view
• INS - insert (a specific object, isolated)

Avoid writing "wide" without committing to how wide. A 24mm wide and a 35mm wide are different videos. If the lens kit you'll be using has three primes, write the focal length next to each shot.

Step 4 - Add the move

Half of the shots on the list should be still. If more than half have camera moves, you're going to be late and the moves are going to feel arbitrary.

For the shots that do move, write the move as a verb plus a direction:

• push in 12cm
• track left 50cm
• tilt down from sky to subject
• rack focus near→far

Specifying the distance and direction means the operator on set doesn't have to ask. That's the whole point of the shot list - to take questions off the day.

Step 5 - Sort by location, then light

The list now needs to be re-ordered. Group shots by physical location first; within a location, group by lighting setup; within a lighting setup, group by lens.

This is the order you'll actually shoot in, which is almost never the order the script reads in. Shooting in script order is the most expensive habit in independent video - every location change is 15–30 minutes of setup; every lens change is 3–5.

If you're doing this in your head, you'll miss a re-order opportunity. If you're doing it in the Shot List Planner, it'll group them for you and surface the optimal shoot order based on lens, location, and lighting setup metadata you've tagged.

Step 6 - Mark the must-haves

Not every shot on the list is equal. Three to five of them are non-negotiable - without them, the edit doesn't cut. The rest are insurance.

Mark the must-haves with a star. On set, shoot the starred shots first, even if it means re-blocking the day's flow. The goal is to leave the location with the cut already possible; the insurance shots are for making the cut better, not for making it exist.

A typical 60-second explainer has 4 must-haves: opening establishing, the hook visual, the pivot shot, and the closing tag. Everything else is connective tissue.

What the list does not contain

Three things a shot list shouldn't try to be:

• A storyboard. The shot list is a text list. The storyboard is a separate document with frames. If you mix them, both get worse. (Separate guide on storyboarding: covered later in this series.)
• A schedule. The list orders the shots; it doesn't promise times. A schedule lives in a separate column or a separate doc.
• A script revision. If the list reveals a shot can't be gotten, you go back and rewrite the script - not paper over it in the list. The list is downstream of the script; never the other way.

A worked example - coffee-grower explainer

Script line: "On a Friday afternoon, I dug six holes and put six baby coffee plants in them."

Concrete nouns: Friday afternoon, six holes, six baby coffee plants.

Shots:

[*] WS  18mm  static       Backyard, afternoon light, low sun
[*] MS  35mm  push in 8cm  Hands digging hole, dirt in foreground
[ ] ECU 50mm  static       Single baby coffee plant in pot, sharp
[*] INS 50mm  static       Plant going into hole, fingers tamping soil
[ ] WS  24mm  tilt down    From tree canopy down to row of six holes

Five shots, three of them must-haves, one location, two lenses, one lighting setup. Twenty minutes of planning saves an hour of guessing on the day.

When the list is too short

If the 20-minute exercise produces fewer than 8 shots for a 60-second piece, the script is doing too much narrating and not enough showing. Go back and rewrite the script to put concrete nouns where the narration was carrying abstract ideas. The shot list is a useful diagnostic: a thin list almost always points to a script that needs another pass.

Bring it to VideoCue

The Shot List Planner runs this whole exercise as a guided form - paste in the script, it surfaces the concrete nouns, you assign shot types, and it sorts the result by location and lens for the shoot day. The Shot List entry covers the format conventions across film and TV traditions, and Establishing Shot is the reference if you want to understand why the wide opener does what it does.