Day out of Days & Crew Schedule

Our cast are contacts now, with rates and availability on them. Both charts here are part of FilmBase’s film scheduling software. This episode is about the two charts that fall out of that: the Day out of Days, the standard report for who works when, and the Crew Schedule, which does the same job for everybody who is not cast.

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Step 1: Read and Paint the Day out of Days

1. Click Schedule in the top navigation bar.
2. Select Day out of Days in the left sidebar.

Everyone on set calls it the DOOD, and yes, it rhymes with dude. This chart is worked out from your schedule, so it always matches the board. Drag a strip to another day and the letters move with it.

Cast run down the left, your dates run across the top, and each cell carries a letter for what that person is doing that day. The one worth explaining is H, a hold day: you are paying to keep somebody available without shooting them.

Look at Wanda’s row: two work days and two hold days, which is what her scenes and the schedule add up to. Those are the numbers Episode 7 is about to spend.

Hold rules

The Hold rules control at the top decides how holds get painted in. Set the gap after which a performer is dropped and picked up again rather than held, and choose which cast tiers get holds at all. You will usually hold a lead across a gap and release a day player.

Paint the days the schedule cannot know about

Those letters are not only worked out for you. Real productions have days the schedule cannot know about, so you can paint them in yourself.

First, the columns stop at the shoot, and a rehearsal usually happens before it. Those columns come from your block’s start and end dates, so widen the block:

1. Select Production Schedule in the left sidebar. Your production runs as lanes on a timeline, and the green one is Block 1.
2. Hover the left edge of the lane — the pointer turns into a resize arrow — and drag it back to October 10. Block 1 now starts three days before the shoot.

Right-click a lane for Rename, Change Colour, Delete, and Set as Shooting Block — the switch deciding whether a lane counts as a shooting period at all. Add Lane in the toolbar makes a new one, with the same switch in its dialog plus a Production Region for a leg shooting in another city.

3. Back on the Day out of Days, there are the extra columns. Now you can paint.
4. The Mode dropdown decides what a left-click puts down — Hold, Travel, Rehearsal, Fitting, Drop, Pickup or Unavailable — and every option’s keyboard shortcut is its own letter. Press R for Rehearsal, then click Wanda’s cell on the eleventh. An R appears.
5. Or right-click a cell instead: the same list is there as Set as Hold / Travel / Rehearsal / Fitting, with drop, pickup and unavailable below. Choose Set as Hold and that cell becomes an H.

Neither is cosmetic. When you build the budget, a rehearsal day arrives as its own line at its own rate — and if you have not given her a separate rehearsal rate, it falls back to the daily rate you already entered.

Conflicts surface here

We let the optimizer solve Wanda’s conflict, but you can put one back by hand. Drag one of Maya’s strips onto the fifteenth and the red badge returns on the strip, and her cell on that date turns red here as well.

A cell flags whenever somebody carries a status on a date they are marked unavailable, so a conflict you introduce with a drag shows up in both places.

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Step 2: Schedule Your Crew

Select Crew Schedule in the left sidebar under Schedule.

Most scheduling software stops at the Day out of Days, because that is the report the unions and the agents ask for. But a gaffer costs money on the days they work too, and nothing in your screenplay says when those days are. This page is the Day out of Days for everybody who is not cast.

It works the same way:

1. The Mode dropdown decides what a click puts down. Crew day types are Prep, Shoot, Travel, Hold and Wrap, and the keyboard shortcut is the letter — press P for Prep, S for Shoot.
2. Your crew contacts are the rows and your dates are the columns. Click and drag along a row to fill a run of days in one go.
3. Click a date header to set that day type for everyone on that date, and drag across headers to do several days at once. That is how you put a whole unit on prep for a week without touching thirty rows.
4. Right-click a row for Fill prep week (before first shoot), Fill wrap day (after last shoot) and Reset this person’s row. Right-clicking a cell adds Reset this date for everyone.

Watch the five columns beside each name while you paint — PREP, SHOOT, TRVL, HOLD and WRAP totals add up per person as you go, so you can see who is on the clock for how long without counting cells.

The toolbar also carries a search box for a crew member or role, a department filter, and a date range if you only want part of the block. Export takes the whole thing out for your production accountant.

Crew are painted rather than worked out because, unlike cast, nothing in the screenplay says when a gaffer starts. Your DOP might come on two weeks early for recces and your gaffer the day before the shoot, and only you know that.

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Your cast and your crew both have their days now, and neither took a spreadsheet. Next we build the budget, and you will see those rates and those day counts arrive on their own.