Director of Photography

What this is about

Equipment decisions follow from scheduling decisions. A lens package built for a golden-hour exterior is the wrong package if that scene ends up shot at 11:00.

Every department needs the same plan in a different view. That is exactly where document collections fail: they only ever serve one perspective well.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• A 50 mm on Super 35 sees 25.4° horizontally; on full frame the same lens sees 39.6°
• 85 mm at T1.4 on a 2 m subject gives about 3 cm of depth
• Direct summer sun at ISO 800 and T2 is roughly 6 stops over — an ND1.8

What the plan has to deliver

A production plan is useful to this role when it provides the following:

• Sun position per location, per shoot day
• Which scenes fall inside the golden-hour window
• Equipment list derived from the shot list, not typed separately
• Camera-to-subject distances noted at the scout

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Scouting a location without measuring the maximum camera-to-subject distance
• Booking a T1.3 lens for a handheld documentary interview

With TillyGen

The schedule in TillyGen carries the sun position for each location, so the light window is part of the plan rather than a separate calculation.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.