How I’d Start My Prep, Now That Headroom Exists

The script shows up weeks before anything else does. No schedule, no locations, no crew list yet. Just a PDF and a start date. Those weeks used to be the best thinking time in my prep, and the leakiest, because everything I thought of went into containers that would all need reconciling later. Margin notes in one app. References in a desktop folder. A notebook only I could read.

Since Headroom went into the hands of other DPs, the question I get most is some version of where do I start?Fair enough. The tool has a few rooms in it, and an empty project doesn’t tell you which door to open first.

But I want to be honest about that question, because it deserves better than a feature walkthrough. Knowing how a tool works and knowing where to begin are different kinds of knowing. I built every corner of this thing, and I’ve still sat with a project for months, fully equipped, circling the start. The blank project was never a software problem. The script is in hand, the job is real, and the first move won’t announce itself. If that’s where you are, you’re not doing it wrong. So here’s the order I work in when I finally talk myself into moving.

Why start in the script?

Because that’s where the film gets decided, and it’s the one phase of prep that needs nobody else’s paperwork to begin.

The first read is the best read you’ll ever get. You’re the audience once, and then never again. On the second pass I slow down and start leaving marks. A lighting instinct here, a lens idea there, a scene I already know will eat a shooting day. You make those marks in Script Mode, on the script itself. Highlight a line, drop a note, draw over the page with the pen.

The part that matters is what happens underneath. That mark isn’t a note on page 47 of a PDF. It’s a note on the scene, and the scene is the unit the whole tool is built around. File that away for now. It pays off the day the schedule arrives, and again every time the schedule changes after that.

Where do the references go while you read?

Onto the Weave, and this part runs parallel to the reading. It always has, in every prep I’ve ever done. Something on page 12 reminds you of a painting, and the painting wants a home before you’ve finished the scene.

The Weave is that home, an open canvas for collecting and arranging images. It’s the place the desktop folder of JPEGs used to be, except the folder never knew what any image was for. I collect wide at first. Stills, paintings, frame grabs, lighting references, whatever is feeding the idea. Group them loosely by feel. Then, as scenes start to declare themselves, I tag images to the scenes they serve. A reference tagged to scene 32 follows scene 32 for the rest of the production, into its Thread and into the brief my gaffer reads. The Weave doubles as the distribution point. Tags let you organize the board in layers, so you can isolate exactly the images you need and send them where they belong.

So the two motions feed each other from the first day. The script tells you what to look for, and the images sharpen how you read the script. By the end of the marking pass the canvas has stopped being decoration and become a working part of the prep.

What happens when the schedule arrives?

This is the moment the tool was built for.

Here was my old routine. The AD sends the schedule, and you or your assistants re-type it into a spreadsheet so you have something you can sort. Every revision, some portion of that happens again. I did it for years, and that re-typing is the specific tedium that finally pushed me to build Headroom. It’s only really doable with a team behind you, and it’s the part of the job that most made me feel like I’d gotten into data entry.

In Headroom you import the schedule instead. A Movie Magic export, a CSV, or pasted text, whichever your AD can give you. Headroom imports it into the Loom, the master scene list: every scene in the show, laid out as one board you can sort and filter. And because your marks and references were pinned to scenes all along, there’s something for the schedule to merge into. Scene 32 arrives carrying a shoot day and a location, and finds your lighting note and your references already sitting on it.

Then you sort. By location, by shoot day, by story day. Seeing every scene at one location stacked in a single column is where the real planning starts, and it’s a view no stripboard PDF will ever give you. Nothing I prepped with before ever managed it.

Where does the deep scene work happen?

Each scene on the Loom opens into its Thread, the scene’s own page. Everything the scene owns collects there. The script pages with your marks, the references you tagged, location stills from the scout, gear flags, an overhead diagram if the scene needs one. When the wide view stops being enough, this is where you go to work on one scene properly.

One habit is worth building early. When you shoot location stills on a scout, attach them to their scenes the same day. Anything that lives on the scene survives the schedule. When scene 32 moves from day 4 to day 11, everything rides along, because none of it was ever tied to day 4 in the first place.

When does the crew see it?

When you’re ready, and through the Brief: the document Headroom builds for your crew out of the scenes you’ve been working in, filtered by role. The gaffer’s version leads with lighting. The AC’s version leads with lenses and camera notes. You send a link, and the link stays current while the schedule keeps moving, or you export a PDF when someone wants paper. There’s also a high-resolution JPG download that zooms deep and works offline. Everything the crew reads is drawn from the same scenes you’ve been building since the first read, which is why nothing gets re-assembled the night before the production meeting.

And if the schedule shows up first?

Then start there. Some jobs arrive schedule-first. You’re attached late, or the script is still in flux. Import the schedule, let the Loom take shape, and work backward into the scenes, adding marks and references as you go. Both doors lead to the same room. Script first is simply the order I’d choose whenever the choice is mine, because the weeks before a schedule exists are too good to spend waiting.

Why did the schedule door come first, then?

A confession about the build order, since it’s the opposite of the order I just gave you. Headroom started with the schedule import. Partly because that re-typing was the wound I was treating, and partly because the script side looked brutally hard to build, and apps for marking up a script already existed. Scriptation had that lane. So for the first stretch of its life, the schedule was the only way into the tool.

Then it launched, and reality corrected me. DPs wanted to try it and couldn’t, because they didn’t have a schedule yet. Of course they didn’t. The schedule lands weeks into a job, and by the time it does, most people have already fallen back into whatever process carried them through the last one. The window where someone is holding a fresh schedule and hasn’t committed to a workflow is tiny. I’d built the front door in the one spot almost nobody was standing.

So I pulled the script surface forward and built it anyway. It was every bit as hard as I’d feared, and harder to test. It’s also now the first thing I’d tell you to open. The order of this article is the order I wish the tool had been born in.

Either way, here’s the moment to watch for. A few weeks in, the AD sends a revised schedule, the fourth one, and you drop it in and go back to whatever you were doing. Somewhere in that non-event is an afternoon you used to lose. That afternoon is the product. Spend it on the film.

John Schmidt is a working cinematographer (Glory, Netflix; Bambai Meri Jaan, Amazon Prime Video; Summertime, Sundance 2020) who built Headroom.

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