A shooting schedule assigns every scene in the film to a specific day, in a specific order, at a specific location. It is built from the breakdown via the stripboard, it is owned by the first AD, and it is the single most consequential document in pre-production.
There is a free printable version here: shooting schedule template.
The ten steps
1. Start from a complete breakdown
Every scene tagged, measured in eighths, with cast, location and elements recorded. Scheduling from an incomplete breakdown produces a schedule that will be rebuilt.
2. Group by location
The first and largest sort. Everything at one place gets shot while you are there, because a company move costs hours and produces nothing.
Be careful to group by real location rather than by scripted set. One house may serve as three different scripted locations, and those scenes should be together even though the script calls them different things.
3. Split day and night within each group
All the day scenes, then all the night scenes, so that you make one lighting transition rather than six. Why this matters so much is covered in day/night, int/ext.
4. Place the fixed constraints first
This is the step that determines the shape of everything, and it is the one people do last.
List everything that cannot move:
- Locations available only on specific dates.
- Actor availability windows.
- Seasonal or weather requirements.
- A set that is built on a certain date and struck on another.
- A specialist, a piece of equipment, or a stunt coordinator with limited dates.
- Public events, holidays, or anything happening at a location regardless of you.
Place these on the calendar before anything else. They are not preferences, they are the walls of the room.
5. Fit the flexible material around them
Everything not fixed becomes the material you use to fill the gaps between the fixed points. Most schedules have more flexible material than people realize, and it is what gives you room to recover later.
6. Balance the days
Now assign day breaks. Each day should carry a realistic load, and realistic means measured rather than hoped for.
Use page counts as the default measure and override with time estimates wherever the page count lies, which is covered in estimating how long a scene takes. A day is not just its page total: count the setups, count the moves, and count the number of times the lighting has to fundamentally change.
Do not make every day identical. Deliberately schedule a lighter day after a heavy one, and after a night block. A schedule with twelve consecutive maximum days is a schedule that will fail in week two.
7. Add banners for everything that costs time and shoots nothing
Company moves, travel days, transitions in and out of nights, set construction and strike, holidays. See day breaks and banners.
The most common scheduling error is a day that looks achievable because the move it contains is not represented anywhere.
8. Check the irreversible sequences
The step that produces genuinely unfixable problems when it is missed.
Go through the script for anything that cannot be undone, and check that the schedule respects it:
- Haircuts, beards, and any physical change to an actor.
- Damage: a broken window, a wrecked car, a demolished wall.
- Progressive states: an injury healing, a pregnancy, a character getting steadily more exhausted.
- Anything consumed or destroyed for which you have limited multiples.
- A set that is redressed from one state to another.
Each of these forces an order, and discovering one after the schedule is locked is expensive.
9. Review the cast
Build the day out of days and read it. Look for actors held across long gaps, actors working a single day in an otherwise empty week, and anyone whose days can be compressed. See scheduling around actor availability.
10. Rearrange, and repeat
A schedule is not built in one pass. Expect ten to twenty versions before it locks, each triggered by new information: a location confirmed, an actor's dates, a budget cut, a scene rewritten.
First-time schedulers count scenes. Experienced ones count the things that are not scenes. The first shot of the day takes one to two hours from crew call. A company move takes one to three. Lunch takes one. A transition from interiors to exteriors takes as long as the relight. Wrap takes an hour that eats into tomorrow's turnaround. On a twelve-hour day, four or five of those hours are frequently spoken for before a single scene is considered. A schedule that assigns twelve hours of scenes to a twelve-hour day is not tight, it is fictional, and everyone will know by Wednesday.
Principles that hold generally
Do not schedule the hardest thing on day one. The crew has not worked together, the equipment is new, and everyone is slower than they will be in week two. Start with something that lets the unit find its rhythm.
Do not schedule the most important thing last. Whatever is at the end of the schedule is what gets compressed when the film runs behind, and films run behind. If a scene is central, put it in the middle.
Keep a cover set. An interior available at short notice when weather kills an exterior. This is the single most valuable structural feature a schedule can have, and it should exist for every exterior week.
Block the nights. All together, with a transition day at each end. See how to plan a night shoot.
Leave the actor's biggest scene until they have found the character, where the other constraints allow. This is a real consideration and it is frequently possible at no cost.
Schedule children early in the day and within their permitted hours. See working with child actors.
Front-load anything weather dependent, so that there is time later to pick it up if it fails.
Stress testing it
Before you lock, run these questions over the schedule. Each one catches a real category of failure.
- What happens if it rains for three days in week two? If the answer is "we lose three days", there is no cover.
- What if the lead actor is ill for two days? Which days could run without them?
- What if day 6 only gets half done? Where does the remainder go?
- Is there any day with more than one company move? Justify it.
- Does any day contain more than two lighting transitions?
- Is anything essential scheduled in the last three days?
- Is any actor being held for more than a week for a single day of work?
- Are the irreversible sequences all in the right order?
- Is there any day that assumes nothing goes wrong? There should not be, because something will.
- Has the first AD, the DP and the line producer all read it? Each will find different problems.
Distributing it
Once built, the schedule is issued as the one-liner for general distribution and as the full schedule, with elements, for departments.
Every version carries a date and a version marker on every page, and every reissue is accompanied by a short note saying what changed. Version control here matters as much as it does for script revisions, and for the same reason.
On a short
The same ten steps, done in an afternoon on a table with index cards.
The steps that matter most at small scale are 4, 6 and 8: place your fixed constraints first, be honest about what a day holds, and check the irreversible sequences. The most common failure on a first short is not a subtle scheduling error, it is three days of work scheduled into two, discovered at 3pm on day one.
And build in slack. A short with a spare half day is a short that finishes. One planned to the minute is one that comes back with a scene missing.
Worked example: a cafe becomes unavailable
In this fictional short, scene 4 is a 4/8-page cafe scene with Maya. Scene 18 is a 6/8-page cafe scene with Maya and Ethan. Scene 22 is a 3/8-page street scene with Ethan. The first plan puts scene 4 on Monday, scene 22 on Tuesday and scene 18 on Wednesday.
The cafe then confirms Monday only. Moving scene 18 beside scene 4 puts 1 2/8 pages at the cafe on Monday. That total describes script length, not a promise that the work fits: check setups, performance, sound, meal time and access hours before approving the move.
Ethan now needs Monday and Tuesday instead of Tuesday and Wednesday. Confirm his availability and revisit the cast DOOD. Issue the revised schedule with a version date, and review any call sheet already prepared from the old plan.
Use the free shooting schedule template to try the reorder, or see how the steps connect in Film Logic's scheduling workspace. If you are doing this without the industry-standard application, scheduling a film without Movie Magic covers what you give up and what you do not.
Next
The strips between the scenes. Next: day breaks, banners, and the practical logic of ordering the days themselves.
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Schedules that recalculate
Film Logic builds the schedule from your breakdown and keeps the arithmetic current: move a scene and the day totals, cast days and day out of days all update, so you find out what a change costs immediately.
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