Tomorrow’s call sheet, done tonight

What the generator does

The call sheet is the one document everybody on the crew actually reads, usually on a phone at 22:00 the night before. It has to answer five questions in ten seconds: when do I need to be there, where exactly, what are we shooting, what will the weather do, and who do I call if something goes wrong. The layout follows that order — the general call is the biggest thing on the page, individual calls that differ from it are underlined.

While you type, the generator checks the sheet the way a careful 1st AD would. It flags a missing hospital, a crew member whose call comes after the first setup, an exterior scheduled after sunset, and a day that runs past ten or twelve hours from the earliest call to wrap. The button “copy for the next shoot day” keeps production, location and crew, moves the date and day number on and clears the schedule and the weather.

How it works

Sun times come from the location’s coordinates and the date, with the same solar formulas as our light planner: sunrise, the start of the evening golden hour (sun at 6°) and sunset, in the local time zone with daylight saving. Pick a city from the list — for anywhere else, the nearest larger city is precise enough for a call sheet; the difference is rarely more than a few minutes.

The working-day check runs from the earliest call on the sheet to the estimated wrap and deducts the break the law requires (§ 4 ArbZG: 30 minutes over six hours, 45 over nine). Above 10 hours it warns about overtime, above 12 hours it marks the day red — the daily maximum of the German film agreement TV FFS. Printing uses your browser: choose “Save as PDF” to send the sheet as a file.

What the generator does not do

• No weather lookup. The weather line is typed by you, deliberately: the forecast that goes on the sheet should be the one you checked the evening before, from the service you trust for that region.
• No hospital search. Find the nearest hospital with an emergency department yourself and check it is open around the clock — a clinic without A&E is the wrong address at 03:00.
• One location per sheet. For a split day with a company move, put the second location and its address into the schedule notes, or make a sheet per unit.
• No distribution. The sheet stays in your browser. Sending it, collecting confirmations and updating everyone when the call moves is exactly the part that breaks with PDFs.

From the set

The classic mistake on a sheet that was copied from the day before: the schedule starts at 07:45 with an interview, the sound recordist still has the 08:00 call from yesterday’s B-roll day, and nobody notices until the talent is miked by the camera assistant. The generator flags that line in the moment you type it.

The second one appears in winter. A team shot at the gate is pencilled in for 16:30 on 24 November in Hamburg — sunset that day is at 16:13. On the sheet the row turns red with “after sunset”; the fix is to swap it with an interior setup before lunch, while the crew still reads the sheet the night before and not on set.