Availability Check

What this is about

It is the first phone call of every schedule. Before a single date is fixed, production asks the DoP, the lead actor, the rental house and the location owner about a rough window, and the answers decide which version of the plan is realistic. The trap is treating a yes as a reservation. Two weeks later the same DoP has taken a feature, because nobody placed a hold and nobody called back. Experienced production managers therefore write down when they asked, what they asked for and when the answer stops being reliable.

A term only helps when everyone on set means the same thing by it — so what follows is how it is used, not a dictionary definition.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• Availability check, hold and booking are three steps with rising commitment; only the last one obliges anyone to show up.
• Ask for a window, not a single day: someone free all week is worth more than someone free on Tuesday.
• Note the date of every answer. An availability from three weeks ago is a rumour, not information.

With TillyGen

TillyGen keeps requested and confirmed dates apart, so a draft schedule never looks more certain than it is.

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.