When the AD Changes the Schedule, Who Moves Your Prep?

Revision 37 lands at 11pm

I open it standing up, because I already know. Day 12 is gone. What was day 12 is now half of day 9 and half of day 15, the church has moved to the back of the week, and the three scenes I had built an entire lighting approach around are shooting in a different order, in a different place, next to scenes I have not thought about yet.

None of my prep knows any of this. My shot list is a document. My references are in folders named after days that no longer exist. My notes are in a spreadsheet I sorted by shoot day, and the shoot days just changed underneath the sort.

So I sit down and start moving it all across. Again.

And none of it is work. I am not thinking about the church, or the light, or the order of the day. I am reading one column and typing it into another, at midnight, and recreating something I already finished. By the time I get to the bottom I have made no decision about anything.

That is the part I could never explain to anyone outside this job. The schedule changing is fine. That is the AD doing theirs, and a show that never moves is a show in trouble. It is that every time it moves, the thinking I already did has to be carried across by hand, and the carrying looks exactly like working.

And it is never once. A series will go through fifty or more working schedules before it wraps, and by the back half of prep you are not looking at revision 4, you are looking at revision 37. They also arrive faster the closer you get, because that is when locations fall through and actors become available and the weather turns.

Which is the part that makes it worse rather than just longer. Moving your prep after the first schedule is nothing, because there is barely any prep to move. Moving it in the last week means dragging everything you have built since: the references you finally found, the lighting you worked out on the scout, the shot list you argued yourself into, the notes from the director. The pile grows the whole time, and the revisions come fastest at the end, so the heaviest version of this job lands in the week you have the least room for it. You are scouting, you are testing, you are in a van, and the schedule moved again.

I did that for years before I built anything. This is about the difference between a tool that helps you carry it and a tool that carries it for you, because almost all of them claim the second and almost all of them do the first.

What are the two jobs when a schedule changes?

There are two, and they get sold as one.

Almost every tool does the first. Very few do the second. And the sentence used to describe both is the same one: keeps your shot list up to date when the schedule changes.

That is true of a tool that hands you a drag handle. It is also true of a tool that reads the AD’s export and works the whole thing out. Those are different products, and the difference is most of your week.

How do I tell which one a tool is?

You can sort any of them into one pile or the other with a single question.

If the answer involves you dragging, reordering, retyping or re-tagging anything, the tool holds your work in the new order. You still did the move. It gave you a nicer surface to do it on, which is worth something, and is not the thing you are in pain about.

If the answer is that you hand it the new schedule and it tells you what changed, the tool did the move.

Can I check that without a trial?

A tool that cannot import a schedule cannot do the second job. Not for want of ambition. It has nothing to compare against. Working out what moved means holding revision 36 and revision 37 side by side, and a tool with no way to read revision 37 has one copy of reality, which is the one you typed in. The only mechanism it has is you.

So find the import first. A schedule export, a CSV, a stripboard PDF, pasted text, anything at all that comes out of the software your AD is using. If a tool takes that file it can at least attempt the comparison. If every shoot day in it is hand-entered, it reorders. You can run that test on a pricing page in about a minute, which is roughly how long I wish I had spent before some of the ones I have paid for.

Where do the tools actually land?

Worth being fair here, because being in the first pile is not an insult. Some of these are very good.

Is this not just part of the job?

Ask around and this is the answer you get. Not advice, a shrug. Everyone moves their prep across by hand, everyone always has, and a DP who complains about it sounds like a DP complaining about weather.

I want to be accurate about why that holds, because it is not laziness. There is nobody to hand it to. A DP does not get an assistant to redo their prep. That is not a line anyone is putting in a budget, and on most jobs the department is you and a camera team who have their own night. So the work has nowhere to go except your evening, and after enough years it stops registering as a task at all. It is just what Sunday is.

There is a more considered version of the same shrug, and I have heard it from people who think about software for a living: the AD’s system and your system are not the same system, so the gap between them gets closed by a human. Software can make the retyping faster. It cannot remove the retyping, because the two do not talk.

That last step does not follow. They do not need to talk. Your AD already sends out a file every time the schedule changes, because that is the whole point of an export, and it goes to twenty people who are not you. Nobody has to agree to anything, nobody has to be asked for permission, and no two companies have to shake hands. Reading a document that is already landing in your inbox and working out what moved is an ordinary thing to build.

Nobody built that for the DP side, which is a different thing from it being impossible. It is why “part of the job” has held up so long as an answer.

Why does anchoring to the scene fix it?

If your prep is organised by day, a schedule change breaks it. Day 12 is a container, the contents of the container changed, and everything inside has to be relocated by hand.

If your prep is organised by scene, a schedule change is just new information about which day each scene sits on. Scene 47 keeps its notes, its references, its shot list and its lighting approach, and it does not care that it moved from Tuesday to Friday. Nothing needs relocating, because nothing was attached to Tuesday in the first place.

Which is also why the question above is a fair one to ask any tool. Anchored to days, it will always need you to move things. Anchored to scenes, it only needs telling the new arrangement.

Where does Headroom fit?

Two ways in.

You can start in the script, before a schedule exists. Read it, mark it up, and every mark pins to its scene. When the AD’s schedule arrives it fuses with the work you already did.

Or you start with the schedule. Your AD’s export builds your master scene list, and your prep grows on top of it. A Movie Magic export, a Cinapse CSV, most schedule spreadsheets, or text pasted straight out of whatever they sent you.

Either way the scene is the unit everything hangs off, so revision 37 is an import rather than an evening. Headroom reads what changed and your work travels with the scenes it belongs to.

If what brought you here is a schedule you have already moved your prep across more times than you can be bothered to count, that is the thing it was built for.

Questions