A day break is a divider on the stripboard marking the end of one shooting day and the start of the next. A banner is a strip that carries information rather than a scene: a company move, a travel day, a holiday, a set being struck, the transition into nights.
Together they are how a schedule represents everything that consumes time without producing footage, which on a typical shooting day is a substantial fraction of it.
Day breaks
A day break usually carries:
- The shoot day number (Day 12 of 30).
- The calendar date and weekday.
- The main location.
- The total page count for the day above it.
- Sometimes sunrise and sunset times, and the crew call.
The page total is the number that matters. It is the quickest available test of whether a day is realistic, compared against the film's average and against what the unit has actually been achieving.
Numbering by shoot day rather than by date is deliberate. Shoot days survive rescheduling: if a day is lost to weather, everything after it shifts by a calendar date but Day 13 is still Day 13. Every other document references the shoot day number for this reason.
Banners
The strips people forget to add, and their absence is the most common reason a schedule is optimistic.
Company move. Moving the unit from one location to another. Costs one to three hours depending on distance and how much gear travels. A banner between two location groups within a day makes that cost visible.
Travel day. A day spent moving the unit between bases, usually shooting nothing.
Holiday or non-shoot day. Weekends, public holidays, and any day the production is not working.
Night transition. Marking the move into or out of a night block, where turnaround reshapes the days on either side.
Set construction / strike. A set being built or torn down, constraining what can be shot and when.
Second unit. Days where a separate unit is working.
Notes. A location's access restriction, a curfew, an actor's release time, a road closure window.
Add up what a twelve-hour day actually contains before you have shot anything. Crew call to first shot: one to two hours. Lunch: one hour. A company move, if there is one: one to three. Wrap and derig at the end. Two of those are not optional and one of them appears nowhere in a page count. This is why a day with eight pages and no move is a completely different proposition from a day with six pages and two moves, and why a schedule that only counts pages will consistently overpromise. Banners exist so that the second day looks as expensive on the board as it is in reality.
Ordering the days
Some principles that apply broadly.
Start gently. Day one should not be the hardest thing in the film. The crew has not worked together, the equipment is unfamiliar, the actors are finding the characters, and everyone is slower than they will be by Friday. A manageable day one buys you a competent week one.
Do not put anything essential at the end. Productions run behind, and the last days absorb the deficit. Whatever is scheduled on the final two days is what gets compressed, dropped, or shot badly. Put the film's most important material in the middle third.
Alternate heavy and light. A run of maximum days produces diminishing returns by day four. Deliberate lighter days are not slack, they are how you keep the rate up.
Recovery after nights. Coming out of a night block, the following day is compromised by turnaround whether you plan for it or not. Plan for it.
Group by location above everything else. The largest single saving available.
Front-load weather-dependent work. If a day exterior fails in week one, there are five weeks in which to pick it up. If it fails in the last week, it is gone.
Consider performance order where it is free. Within a location block, ordering scenes in story sequence costs nothing and helps actors considerably. It is worth asking for and it is frequently possible.
Respect the irreversible. Haircuts, damage, progressive injuries. Covered in how to build a shooting schedule, and the source of the worst scheduling errors.
Inside a single day
The ordering within a day follows its own logic.
Group by setup direction. Shoot everything facing one way before turning the camera around, because turning around means relighting.
Do the hardest setup while the crew is fresh, usually mid-morning after the first shot has settled everyone in.
Schedule around the light for exteriors. Scenes needing hard morning light go early; scenes with no light requirement become the flexible material used to fill gaps.
Put simple scenes after lunch. The post-lunch hour is measurably slower on every production ever made.
Release actors when you can. If someone's scenes can be grouped in the morning, that is a real saving on their day and on the second AD's logistics.
Keep something in reserve for the end of the day. A short scene in an already-lit space, so that if you finish early the time is used, and if you run late it is the easiest thing to drop.
The pattern of a shooting week
Worth knowing because it is consistent across productions.
Monday is slower than it should be. Tuesday to Thursday are the productive days. Friday is fast in the morning and depends heavily on whether the week has gone well. Anything scheduled for late Friday after a difficult week is at risk.
Six-day weeks are noticeably less productive per day than five-day weeks, and the sixth day is often close to a wash once fatigue is accounted for.
None of this is an argument for scheduling less. It is an argument for putting the difficult material where the crew is capable of doing it.
On a short
The same logic at smaller scale, and two things matter most.
Represent the moves. If your three-day short shoots at four locations, you have at least one move, probably more, and each one is an hour you have not counted. Write them on the schedule as their own line.
Do not plan a day with no slack. A short with a spare hour at the end of each day finishes. One planned end to end comes back missing a scene, and the missing scene is always the one at the bottom of the last day.
And number your days as Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 rather than by date. When something slips, and it will, the paperwork still makes sense.
Next
The document that turns the schedule into an answer about actors: who is needed when, and what that costs.
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Day totals that stay honest
Film Logic keeps day breaks and banners on the board with the scenes, so page counts, moves and transitions all sit in the same place and every day total reflects the whole day rather than just the scenes in it.
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