An editorial shoot lives or dies on the running order. The brief arrives as a mood and a word count, and our job is to turn it into a list a crew can work through in a day and an editor can lay out on a page.
Start from the layout
We ask where the pictures land before we plan them. An opening spread wants a wide horizontal frame with room for a headline. Column breaks want verticals. Knowing this early means we shoot the orientations the page needs instead of cropping our way out of trouble afterwards.
Write the list as scenes
Each line on our list is a place, a light and a person doing something: the workbench at mid-morning, hands on the tool, half-length. Written that way the list doubles as a schedule, because it tells us when to be where.
Order it by the sun
The list gets reordered around the building. West-facing rooms go late, the courtyard goes at noon when the wall bounces, the interiors fill the flat hour after lunch. The crew moves once through the space instead of walking back and forth.
Leave gaps on purpose
We hold two slots open with nothing written in them. The best frame of a shoot is often the thing nobody planned — a corridor, a gesture, a stack of material by a door. Without a gap in the running order there is no room to take it.
Agree what has to exist
Before the day we mark which frames are non-negotiable for the story and which are there if time allows. When the schedule slips, and it does, everyone knows what stays.
