Nine o'clock the night before
The shoot is at a client's office in Leeds tomorrow. The production coordinator opens last week's call sheet in Word and starts replacing everything: client contact, address, parking instructions, unit base, crew list with phone numbers, call times by department, schedule for the day, lunch, nearest hospital, weather. Half of it is in her email, some is in the location recce notes, and the director's shot list is in a Google Doc.
She sends it as a PDF to the crew at 10pm. At 11 the client emails to say the car park is closed tomorrow. She texts the crew. Two do not see it and arrive at the closed car park. The makeup artist is still on last week's version, which had a different call time.
Why call sheets eat evenings
- The information comes from several places: crew bookings, location notes, client emails and the director's schedule.
- Every shoot starts from a copy of the last call sheet, carrying its mistakes.
- Individual call times differ by department and have to be worked out by hand.
- Late changes go out by text, not as a new version, so the crew end up with different information.
- Safety details such as the nearest hospital are looked up again each time.
What the call sheet must include for safety on your shoots is for your production team and any safety adviser to decide. The build makes sure what they decided appears every time.
What bad call sheets cost
Crew arriving at the wrong place or time costs the first hour of a shoot day, which is the most expensive hour to lose. Missing details, like parking or access, cause friction with clients and locations. And coordinators spend the evening before every shoot doing data entry, which is exactly when they should be checking everything else is ready.
How we build call sheets from the shoot record
- Each shoot record already holds the booked crew and their roles, taken from the crew booking board.
- Location details come from the location record: address, what3words or map pin, parking, access, unit base, nearest hospital, and contact on site.
- The day's schedule is entered once, or imported from a spreadsheet or scheduling tool you already use.
- Call times are set per department and adjusted per person if needed.
- The call sheet is generated as a PDF and a mobile-friendly page in your template, and each crew member gets their own copy with their call time at the top.
- When anything changes, a new version is issued with a short change note at the top, and each crew member is asked to tap to acknowledge. The coordinator sees who has not.
- Weather for the location and date is added automatically from a forecast service, clearly marked as a forecast.
| Call sheet section | Comes from |
|---|---|
| Crew and contacts | Crew booking board |
| Location, parking, access | Location record |
| Nearest hospital | Location record, checked by the coordinator |
| Schedule | Shoot schedule |
| Individual call time | Department call time, adjusted per person |
| Changes | Version history with a change note |
The night before, rebuilt
The coordinator opens tomorrow's shoot and generates the call sheet. Crew and location details are already there. She checks the schedule and call times and sends it at 6pm. When the client emails about the car park, she updates the parking field and reissues. Every crew member gets version 2 with a change note saying car park closed, use the multi-storey on the next street. She sees two have not acknowledged and rings them.
Everyone arrives at the right car park. The makeup artist has her own call time on her phone.
Over time the location records get richer. The second shoot at the same office pulls in the parking note, the loading bay, the name of the facilities manager and the fact that the lift is small, all recorded after the first visit, so the coordinator is not asking the client the same questions twice.
If your evenings look like this
- Call sheets are built in Word from last week's copy.
- Late changes go out by text.
- Crew have arrived with different versions of the call sheet.
- Nearest hospital and parking are looked up again for every shoot.
- The coordinator's evening before each shoot is spent retyping.