Shooting Locations, Map Pins & Travel Time

Location distances feed the optimizer, so this episode is part of film scheduling as much as logistics. In this episode, we will create real-world production locations for Dead Tired, extract GPS coordinates automatically from Google Maps links, and optimize our schedule based on geographic travel distance.

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Step 1: Create Real-World Production Locations

1. Click Schedule in the top navigation bar.
2. Select Locations in the left sidebar.
3. Click Add Location in the toolbar.
4. In the location dialog, enter Gran's House (Main Location) in the Name field.
5. Enter the street address at 1920 Hillhurst Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90027, and attach your recce photo.

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Step 2: Paste Google Maps Link for Automatic GPS Extraction

1. Paste a Google Maps URL directly into the URL field:
   https://maps.google.com/?q=34.1065,-118.2872
2. FilmBase automatically extracts exact latitude (34.1065) and longitude (-118.2872) coordinates from the link.
3. An interactive map pin appears on the location card.

That pin does two jobs. The optimizer can only shorten travel between locations it knows the real-world distance between (Step 4 below), and the call sheet can only fetch a live weather forecast for a location that has coordinates (Episode 10). A location without a pin still works; it just cannot do either of those.

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Step 3: Assign Story Locations to Real Addresses

Screenplays list story locations (like “Gran’s Living Room”, “Gran’s Kitchen”, “Gran’s Garden”), but in production, all three are shot at one physical house address:

1. Locate the Unassigned Story Locations drawer.
2. Drag the story location chips for Gran's Living Room, Gran's Kitchen, and Gran's Garden onto the Gran's House (Main Location) card.
3. Repeat this process for your other production locations in Los Feliz, assigning Corner Shop to 1750 N Vermont Ave and Garage to 4600 Hollywood Blvd.

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Step 4: Geographic Schedule Re-Optimization

First, give the optimizer a real constraint to work around.

1. On the Locations page, open Corner Shop and mark it unavailable on two of your shoot dates, as though the owner will only let you in later in the week.

This is the location half of the hard rule Episode 2 pointed at, and it only works on a real-world location like this one. Story locations that came out of the script import are not checked.

2. Select Stripboards in the left sidebar under Schedule.
3. Click Optimize, then Optimize Schedule.

The corner shop scenes move off those two dates on their own.

FilmBase calculates the actual driving distances between your location map pins, rebalancing the schedule to eliminate unnecessary company moves across shoot days.