"Interval" is a 12-minute short about two strangers meeting repeatedly in a hospital waiting room across different years. I shot it in three days in January with a crew of four people, a Sony FX3, two Sigma primes, and a budget of about €2,000. It's finished now and I'm proud of it, but there's a list of things I'd do differently.
Location scouting is worth the extra week
I locked the hospital waiting room location two days before the shoot. I'd visited once, thought it looked good, confirmed with the facility manager, moved on. On shoot day I discovered the ceiling lights were fluorescent with a flicker frequency that showed up badly at 24fps. We ended up flagging all the practicals and lighting entirely with our own kit, which took three hours on day one and left us rushed for the rest of the shoot.
Scout twice. On the second visit, bring your camera, shoot test frames at your intended settings, and play them back on a monitor. You'll catch things a walkthrough misses.
Shot lists are for you, not for the crew
I came in with a 47-shot list and covered about 30 of them. The shots I didn't get weren't because we ran out of time — they were shots where, on the day, I looked at the scene and decided they didn't serve the film. A detailed shot list is useful for planning equipment and thinking through coverage, but you should be willing to discard half of it when reality differs from your imagination of the scene.
The color grade took longer than the shoot
I estimated two weeks for color grading and spent six. Part of this was inexperience with DaVinci Resolve, part was chasing consistency across three days of shooting with slightly different lighting each day. I should have hired a colorist — not because I couldn't do it, but because the time I spent in the color room was time I wasn't writing the next project.