Why we still shoot with paper notebooks

In an agency that handles the latest cameras, drones and sophisticated editing software, we are sometimes asked why every team member still carries a paper notebook in their shoot bag. The answer comes down to one word: battery.

In detail

A paper notebook never crashes, needs no connection, and survives a full day under the sun or the rain without a problem. On a shoot, these constraints are not trivial: they sometimes decide whether an idea gets written down in time or lost for good.

But the real reason runs deeper. Writing by hand forces you to slow down, to shape an idea rather than type it half-formed. Many of the agency's best editing decisions first appeared as a scribbled line in the margin of a shot list, not as a digital note.

Notebooks also pile up, project after project, forming a collective memory no one ever planned to organise but that everyone occasionally checks. Finding the notebook from a shoot two years ago is oddly faster than searching through a badly named digital folder.

That does not mean the agency turns its back on technology, quite the opposite. But some simple tools survive every trend, because they do exactly what is expected of them, without ever crashing at the worst possible moment.

One story often comes up internally: a notebook forgotten on a shoot was found three weeks later by a villager, who mailed it back. Inside, a scribbled note helped us recover the exact name of a location nobody on the team could place on a map anymore.

We have tried, more than once, to fully replace the notebook with a note-taking app on a phone. The experiment never lasted more than a few weeks: typing on a screen mid-shoot pulls attention away in a way a pen and paper never do.

The real balance, for us, is not choosing between analogue and digital, but using each tool for what it does best. The notebook captures the idea in the moment; the editing software then turns it into something an audience can see. Neither replaces the other.

Some team members now own a collection of filled notebooks going back several years, almost a logbook of the agency itself. Nobody has taken the time to fully digitise them yet, and that might be just fine: some things are better left exactly as they were written, by hand, in the moment.

We eventually turned this habit into part of how we welcome every new hire: a fresh notebook, handed over on day one, even before the laptop. It is a small gesture, but it says a lot about how the agency sees its own craft, somewhere between hands-on discipline and modern tools.

Some notebooks even end up circulating between several team members, annotated in the margins by different hands, weeks apart. Those shared notebooks tell, better than any meeting summary could, how an initial idea transformed with every person who picked it up in turn.

We do not claim this habit suits everyone, or even every agency. But it reminds us, page after page, that technology serves the craft rather than the other way round: a notebook never replaces a good edit, but a good edit almost always starts with an idea jotted down somewhere, by hand, before anyone truly thought it through.

We are occasionally asked whether clients ever get to see these notebooks. Almost never, and that is deliberate: they are working tools, full of half-formed ideas and crossed-out attempts, not a polished presentation. What clients see is the result of everything those pages made possible, nothing more, nothing less.