Gaffer

What this is about

Light is the slowest thing on set to change. Every lamp that goes up goes up in time the schedule has to contain, and every location decides beforehand how much power, access and rigging that takes.

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:

• House power or generator is a scouting answer, not a shoot-day discovery
• A pre-light day moves rigging hours out of the most expensive day of the production
• The plan for a window scene depends on where the sun stands at its scheduled hour

What the plan has to deliver

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

• Power and load-in facts from the scout, in writing
• Rigging and de-rigging as scheduled blocks, not gaps
• The sun's position at the hour a scene is actually planned
• Order changes flagged before the truck is packed

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Building rigging plans from floor plans without a site visit
• Leaving the biggest relight for the hour with the least daylight margin

With TillyGen

TillyGen turns the shot list into setups with rigging time attached, so the lighting day is planned in real minutes, not in optimism.

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.