Contingency is the deliberate slack a production builds into its money, its schedule and its plans so that a single failure does not become a crisis. Locations fall through, actors get ill, weather takes days, equipment breaks, and something always happens. Contingency is what converts those events from disasters into adjustments.
The three forms are budget contingency, schedule contingency, and specific pre-planned alternatives. Most productions carry the first, some carry the second, and very few carry the third, which is the one that saves the day when a location disappears.
Budget contingency
A percentage of the total budget held back, unallocated, against the unforeseen.
How much: typically 5 to 10 percent on a well-planned production. Higher on anything with substantial exteriors, effects, animals, or a first-time director. Financiers and completion guarantors expect to see it, and a budget with no contingency reads as inexperienced.
The rules that make it work:
- It is not a slush fund for things you wanted anyway. The moment contingency is used for an upgrade rather than a problem, it has stopped being contingency.
- Do not spend it in the first half. Productions that use their contingency in week one have no protection in week five, which is when they need it.
- Track it visibly. The UPM or line producer reports what remains, and everyone senior should know that number.
Schedule contingency
Time is the scarcer commodity and the harder one to hold in reserve.
Slack days. One or two unscheduled days at the end of the shoot, held for pickups and recovery. These are the first thing cut when a budget gets tight and among the most valuable things a schedule contains.
Slack within days. Not scheduling every day to its absolute limit. A day planned at ninety percent capacity absorbs a problem; a day planned at a hundred and ten percent exports it to tomorrow.
Flexible material. Scenes with no fixed constraint, that can move almost anywhere. Deliberately keeping some of these unplaced late in the schedule gives you something to swap in when a fixed day fails.
Front-loading the vulnerable. Anything weather-dependent or otherwise fragile goes early, so there is time to recover it. Covered in how to build a shooting schedule.
Specific alternatives
The form of contingency that actually rescues a day, and the one most productions do not prepare.
Cover sets. An interior, prepped and available at no notice, for when weather kills an exterior. Every week containing exteriors should have one. To be real it must be genuinely available, already dressed, close enough to reach, and holding enough material to fill the day.
Backup locations. For anything essential and anything you do not control, a second option kept warm: identified, assessed, and with a contact who knows you might call. It costs a phone call every couple of weeks to maintain and it is the difference between a phone call and a catastrophe.
Scene-level alternatives. For each shooting day, knowing what you would shoot instead. This is a fifteen-minute exercise per week and almost nobody does it.
Understudy plans. For small parts, knowing who else could play it. Not viable for leads, and viable more often than people think for day players.
Almost every other element of a production is contracted with someone who works in the industry and understands the consequences of pulling out. Locations are usually controlled by people with no stake in your film: a shop owner, a family, a building manager. They can sell the property, have an emergency, get nervous about the disruption, or simply decide it sounds like more trouble than the fee is worth. None of that is bad faith and all of it is outside your control. This is why the location department keeps second options alive, why the agreement should be signed rather than verbal, and why "a friend said we could use their flat" is the least secure arrangement in filmmaking.
The playbook: a location falls through
It is the day before, or the morning of, and the location is gone. What actually happens:
1. Confirm it is really gone. Sometimes it is a misunderstanding, a scheduling conflict that can be moved, or a problem solved with money. Ask what would make it possible.
2. Tell the first AD and the producer immediately. Not after you have tried to fix it. Every hour of delay narrows the options.
3. Work out what is actually needed. Not the location, but the scenes. What do they require: an interior, a particular kind of space, specific geography, continuity with something already shot?
4. Run the options in parallel, because you do not have time to run them in sequence:
- Swap the day. Move a different day's work here and push these scenes later. This is usually the best answer and it is what schedule flexibility is for.
- Use the backup location. If one has been kept warm, this is why.
- Find a substitute today. The location team calls everything they know. This works more often than it should, because location managers have deep networks.
- Shoot it somewhere you already have. Frequently a scene can be re-set in a location you already control, at the cost of a small rewrite. Cheaper than it sounds and often invisible in the finished film.
- Rewrite the scene. Move it to a different kind of place entirely, or fold it into another scene.
- Cut it. The last option, and sometimes the correct one. Ask whether the film survives without it.
5. Decide fast and communicate once. A decision made at 6pm and circulated clearly is worth more than a better decision made at 10pm. Every department needs to re-plan.
6. Reissue the call sheet. New location, new call times, new movement order.
7. Recalculate the rest of the schedule. What moved, what is now at risk, what does this do to cast days and the day out of days.
Other common failures
An actor is ill. Shoot their coverage another day and shoot around them. Check the DOOD for what else could move into the slot. If it is a lead and it is more than a day or two, this becomes a producer-level decision about the whole schedule.
Equipment fails. Which is why rental houses have replacements and why you check the kit before the day rather than on it. Have the hire house's out-of-hours number on the call sheet.
Weather. Cover set, or swap days. Decide the night before wherever possible so people know where to go.
You are behind. The AD identifies what can be dropped or combined, and the producer decides. The worst response is to try to make it up by rushing, which produces unusable material and puts you further behind.
Someone is hurt. Everything stops. Safety first, then the paperwork, then the schedule. Nothing on this list matters more than this one.
The mindset
The productions that handle problems well are not luckier. They have three habits.
They assume something will go wrong, and treat contingency as a normal part of planning rather than an admission of pessimism.
They decide quickly. A prompt adequate decision beats a slow optimal one, because a shooting day is a depreciating asset.
They communicate clearly and once. The second-order damage from a problem usually comes from half the crew acting on out-of-date information.
A plan that only works if nothing goes wrong is not a plan. It is a hope with a schedule attached.
Next
That closes Chapter 5 and the whole of pre-production. Chapter 6 turns to the single most-searched document in filmmaking, the one that turns all of this planning into instructions somebody can follow: the call sheet.
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