Gathering Your Assets from Day One
The most painful EPK problem is one you can't fix later: missing images. Great press stills and behind-the-scenes photos have to be captured while you're shooting — try to recreate them once the crew's gone home and you can't. This chapter is about collecting the hard-to-get assets before it's too late.
Most of your EPK — the synopsis, the bios, the press release — you can write any time, from your desk, a year after the shoot. But a few elements have an expiration date, and the biggest is images. Press stills and behind-the-scenes photos are enormously valuable to an EPK — they're literally the pictures that get published — and they are extremely difficult to fake after the fact. Once your locations are struck, your cast has scattered, the costumes are returned, and the sets are torn down, you can't easily recreate that shot of your lead in character on that rooftop at magic hour. Filmmakers discover this too late constantly: they finish the film, go to build the kit, and realize their only usable "still" is a compressed frame-grab from the edit, which looks soft and unprofessional next to a real photograph. The fix is entirely about foresight — capture the hard-to-get assets while the production exists, so that when you build the EPK, the expensive part is already done.
What to capture during production
While you're shooting, gather:
- Production stills. Real photographs of scenes and characters, ideally shot by someone with a stills camera during or between takes — not frame-grabs. These are the images press will actually run.
- Behind-the-scenes (BTS) photos. The camera setup, the director working, the crew on location. BTS shots humanize the film and give press a second category of images to use.
- A unit still or two of key moments. Even one strong, well-composed, high-res photo of your central image or character is worth more than a dozen weak frame-grabs.
- Cast & crew info while you have them. Grab headshots, correct name spellings, credits, and short bios from your team while everyone's around and reachable — chasing these later is a slog.
- Location & production notes. Jot the details you'll want for the press release and notes — where you shot, an anecdote, the scale of the production. Memory fades; write it down.
- Poster-worthy frames. Keep an eye out for compositions that could become key art, and grab a clean high-res version if you can.
How to make it happen on a no-budget shoot
You might be thinking you can't afford a dedicated set photographer, and you probably can't — but you don't need a big budget to solve this, you need intention. The cheapest, most effective move is to make stills someone's job, even informally: ask a crew member with a decent camera or even a good phone to grab real photos during setups and between takes, or bring a friend for a day specifically to shoot stills and BTS. It costs little and it's the difference between a professional-looking kit and a frame-grab kit. If you truly can't get set photography, then at minimum shoot your highest-quality footage of a few key moments knowing you might pull frames — but understand that a purpose-shot photograph almost always beats a frame-grab, so try for the real thing first. Beyond images, use the shoot to lock down the human details: collect proper name spellings and credits from everyone (misspelled names in an EPK are embarrassing and common), get headshots while your cast is in front of you, and note the production facts and stories you'll mine for the press release. The governing principle is simple: your EPK is being made, or lost, during production, whether you're thinking about it or not. The filmmaker who spends a little intention on stills, BTS, and details while shooting walks into post with the hardest EPK assets already in hand; the one who doesn't spends the press push apologizing for soft images and chasing crew for their credits. Even if your film is already shot and you're building the EPK now, this chapter still helps — do a quick audit of what images you have, and if they're thin, consider whether a small reshoot of a key moment or a portrait session with your lead could give you one strong hero image. And going forward, on every project, bake stills into your plan from day one. With your assets gathered, the course moves into crafting the written pieces — starting with the words that hook people: your logline and synopsis.
On an early film I had no stills — just the footage — and when press wanted images, all I could offer were muddy frame-grabs that looked exactly as amateur as they were. Lesson learned hard. Ever since, I make stills a job: I ask a crew member or bring a friend for a day, and they shoot real photos of the scenes and the making-of. It costs almost nothing and it's the single highest-return thing you can do for your future EPK. When the press push comes, I've got crisp, publishable photographs ready — because I captured them when the production was alive, not after it was a memory.
Assemble your EPK in the Filmmaker Toolbox — keep your synopsis, bios, stills, poster, and press release organized in one place so you can export a clean, up-to-date press kit the moment a festival or journalist asks for it.