Before the screens, the light meters and the playlists, there is a small black notebook. Inside it, a shoot quietly begins.
Every shoot I direct begins in the same unglamorous place: a small black notebook with a bent corner and a pen that is always about to run dry. Long before the first frame, before the crew arrives and the kettle is on, I sit alone with it and write things that make sense to no one else.
What the Page Remembers
The notes are rarely technical. Aperture and shutter speed live in the camera, where they belong. The notebook holds fragments: the green of a coat that reminded me of wet moss, a sentence a model said while pinning her hair, the way the afternoon light slid across the floor like spilled milk. Words I would otherwise lose the moment the day speeds up.
A shoot moves quickly once it begins. Decisions stack on top of each other, and by evening it is hard to remember why a certain direction felt right at ten in the morning. The notebook keeps the original instinct intact, like a pressed flower. When a concept wavers around midday, I turn back to the first page and ask whether we are still telling the story I promised myself.
There is a particular pleasure in drawing, too. Terrible little sketches: a stick figure leaning against a doorway, an arrow for the direction of the light, a circle where the eye should rest. I am no illustrator, but a bad sketch commits to an idea in a way a long conversation never does. Showing it to the stylist or the photographer's assistant takes five seconds, and suddenly we are all looking at the same picture.
The Slowness of Ink
I have tried apps. They are tidy and searchable and they never smell like anything. Handwriting forces a slower kind of attention. You cannot scribble a thought without first deciding it deserves the space, and that small act of choosing is already the beginning of editing. The pages that survive are the ones where the handwriting grew careless and fast, where something happened that I did not want to miss.
When the day is over and the set is quiet, I read the last page before I close the book. Often it contains a single line, written in haste between setups, that turns out to be the title of the whole editorial. The images are what the world sees, but the notebook is where the shoot first spoke. And somewhere in its margins, in ink that has already begun to fade, the next story is waiting.
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