The Holy Grail of Production Management: The Call Sheet
Last year, in the module ‘Professional Studies’, we were introduced to the more relevant documentation that comes along with filmmaking. Back then, as I have blogged about in my blog ‘Call Sheets, Shot Lists, and Location Recces!’, we were mainly introduced to the call sheet, to which I then referred to as ‘the backbone of every production.’
And while I still remain true to that statement, I will need to make a couple of general amendments, since I’ve had more experiences in working with call sheets in the meantime. Now, I would rather call it ‘the Holy Grail of Production Management.’
Something Old
To give you a quick recap of my previous findings on call sheets, I will quickly summarise last year’s previous research on it, before I then outline the additional learning I received since then.
The Structure of a Call Sheet
Back then, I enlisted the most important elements of a call sheet as follows (in no particular order):
- name of production
- time and place with address (and parking possibilities)
- maps
- weather and temperature
- times of sunrise and sunset (for outdoor filming)
- cast and crew with contact details (major roles)
- with larger crews: division into production units
- production schedule or time table for cast and crew
- tasks and responsibilities
- meals and breaks
- notes specific to the production or shoot (such as 'closed set' or 'non-smoking')
- health and safety regulations
- various radio channels for each unit/department, and
- the address and contact details of the nearest hospital and police station as well as the nearest exit of emergency!
I furthermore elaborated on the production schedule contained within the call sheet and enlisted all the elements in which it is divided into (this time, in order of appearance):
- scene number
- scene description
- pages of the script
- relevant cast for the scene
- shot size and particularities, and
- specialist equipment or non-standard handling.
Since, back then, I just about started to create my first call sheet, I displayed a censored version of the production schedule of Pirates of the Caribbean - On Stranger Tides, which we had talked about in class as a point of reference. Back then, I wholeheartedly assumed that it would still take me quite a while to reach this level of filmmaking in which I would be able to either write up or even see a call sheet like this in real life.
And while that might hold true to the extent and amount of the people referred to within the call sheet itself, I did not know back then that I would soon be enlisted to work on a project that had a very similar appearance – Looted!
Something New
With the BBC project Looted, I was suddenly encountering call sheets with a high level of complexity (at least much higher than what we did on our student productions) on a daily basis. And while the call sheet, contrary to my previous research of last year, was not created by the 1stAD, but rather by one of the Production Managers on Looted, the complexity and inherent setup of the call sheets were rather similar to that one from the Pirates of the Caribbean.
And while I am not allowed to publicly display any of the call sheets that I received from Looted due to reasons of confidentiality, I decided that I would take one of these call sheets as a source of inspiration and create one for our production ACTION! that would be rather similar in structure. Here, I have uploaded a censored version of my current call sheet for action and contrasted it with the one I created in LVL4.
As you can see, I deviated from the previous setup that I researched in LVL4 and ditched elements such as the map, division into production units, and the radio channels for each units, along with a colour-coded version of the shots to be taken on that day.
I made these amendments since we are currently a production consisting of only five crewmembers filming in a manageable area that does not require communication via walki-talkies.
Furthermore, since we are ‘only’ filming a 30-second commercial with no more than eight different shots (alternative shots included), I figured that the schedule would be rather straightforward anyway and that additional colour-coding would be more confusing than helpful.
Finally, since we are not using (or rather not able to use) specialist equipment due to the nature of the area (we are filming in an uneven, dried up river bed that does not allow the use of a track and dolly), I furthermore eliminated that info section from the call sheet.
The only pieces of information that need to be updated closer to the time of filming, will be the data regarding the weather and the temperature (hence the marker/reminder in the document). But that is more a matter of time than anything else.
References:
Hartle, S. (2018) Call Sheets, Shot Lists, and Location Recces! [online] https://sveahartle.wixsite.com/sveaexmachina/single-post/2018/02/19/Call-Sheets [Accessed on 20 November 2018]