Cast & Crew Contacts, Rates and Availability

We have a schedule and a breakdown, but so far every person on this production has been a name in a script. In this episode we turn them into contacts with real rates and real availability.

A budget cannot work out what a performer costs until it knows their rate, and the optimizer cannot route around an actor who is unavailable until somebody tells it when.

---

Step 1: Create a Cast Contact

1. Click Cast & Crew in the top navigation bar.
2. Select Contacts in the left sidebar. This is the production’s address book, and it holds cast, crew, suppliers, and drivers.
3. Click Add Contact.
4. Set Contact Type to Cast.
5. Enter Wanda as the first name and Maximoff as the last, then fill in the email and phone.
6. Attach her photo. The demo pack you downloaded has headshots for the whole cast in its ProfileImages/Cast folder.

The photo is worth adding: it appears again on the call sheet and on the budget line.

---

Step 2: Assign the Character and Set the Rate

1. Open the Cast Details section.
2. Under Assigned Characters, choose MAYA.

FilmBase already knows which scenes Maya appears in, because it read that out of the screenplay in Episode 1. The moment you connect Wanda to Maya, it knows which days she works.

3. Open Rates & Deal. Under Daily Rates, enter 2500 against Work Day and 1250 against Hold Day, since a hold is normally paid at a lower rate than a shooting day.

There are Week Rate and Month Rate fields alongside them for performers on a weekly or run-of-show deal.

Enter these once and the budget reads them from here. Each rate you fill in becomes its own line under her in the budget, so in Episode 7 she will arrive with a work day line and a hold day line, each at the rate you just set.

---

Step 3: Mark an Actor Unavailable

1. Open the Unavailability section.
2. Click Add Unavailability.
3. Our shoot runs October 13–17, so block out October 15, which is Day 3, as though she were on another job that day. It appears under Managed Blocked Dates. One date is enough to see this work.
4. Click Finalize Contact.

In Episode 2 the optimizer told us it always respects cast availability. This is where that information comes from, and until somebody fills it in there is nothing for the optimizer to respect.

Now look at what that did. Go to Schedule → Stripboards and scroll to Shoot Day 3, October 15, before you do anything else. Maya is our lead, so she is in most of the scenes that day, and every one of her strips now carries a small red badge with a warning icon and a count, next to the cast numbers.

Hover over one and it names the problem: Wanda Maximoff (MAYA) unavailable on Oct 15. Those badges appeared the moment the contact was saved.

Now click Optimize, then Optimize Schedule. The scenes Maya appears in move off the fifteenth, and the badges clear as they go.

Repeat this for the rest of the cast. For crew, choose Crew as the contact type and give them a department and a role instead of a character.

---

Our cast now exists as people, with rates the budget can read and dates the optimizer has to work around. Next we look at the two charts that fall out of all this: the Day out of Days for your cast, and the Crew Schedule for everybody else.