Stop 3 of 8 · Weekly
Shot list, schedule, call sheet
Treatment beats become shots with kit attached, shots become a day ordered by light and location, and the day becomes a call sheet the crew can read at six in the morning.
The beats already told you the shots
The treatment says beat four is the operations manager walking the floor at shift change. That beat implies six shots, a 35mm on the gimbal, a lav on the manager, a second body for cutaways, and twenty minutes of a working floor that nobody controls. Writing that out used to be the evening before the recce.
Claude does the expansion. Ramez does the cutting. What comes back is always too long, and that is useful: a forty shot list for a two minute film tells him he has written a five minute film.
The shot list columns
| Field | What goes in it | Why the crew cares |
|---|---|---|
| Scene and shot | Beat number, shot letter | It is how the slate and the bins get named |
| Size and movement | MCU, handheld push in | The operator knows before the client asks |
| Kit and audio | Lens, support, mic | The gaffer packs from this column |
| Time and priority | Minutes, must have or nice | It is what gets cut at four in the afternoon |
The priority column is the one Ramez insists on. A day always runs late, and the decision about what to drop should be made on a laptop the week before, not in a corridor with a client watching.
The day is built around light and travel
Shooting order has nothing to do with the order of the film. Group by location, then by the light each shot needs, then lay in travel, setup, lunch and the wrap buffer. Exteriors go where the sun is right. Interviews go where the building is quiet, which in most offices is before ten or after four.
Inside my studio Project. Turn the attached treatment into a shot list. One row per shot with: beat number, shot letter, description, size, movement, lens, support, audio, estimated minutes on the floor, and a priority of must have or nice to have. Cover every beat. Then tell me the total floor time, and which rows you would cut first if the day loses two hours. [paste the treatment]
Build a two day schedule from this shot list. Group by location first, then by the light each shot needs. Include travel between locations, setup and derig, a lunch break, and a thirty minute buffer before wrap each day. Show it as a table of time block, location, shots covered. Tell me every assumption you made about distance, access or daylight so I can check it on the recce.
Draft a call sheet for day one from that schedule, in my studio format: date, general crew call, location name and address, weather line, unit call times per role, a shot summary per time block, kit notes, parking and access notes, and nearest hospital. Leave the contact column empty with a placeholder for each role. Do not invent any phone number, name or address you were not given.
When the location falls through at nine at night
It happens on half the corporate jobs: the boardroom is booked, the factory floor has an audit, the roof needs a permit nobody applied for. Paste the schedule back in and name the change.
The Tuesday boardroom is no longer available. We keep the lobby and the factory floor. Rebuild the two day schedule so the interview block moves to the quietest space we still have, tell me which shots become impossible, which ones change look, and what I need to ask the client for by tomorrow morning. Keep every must have shot or explain why one cannot survive.