Contingency

What this is about

Every production meets something the plan did not contain: a location that needs more light, a day that runs long, a delivery format nobody mentioned. A declared reserve gives those events somewhere to land without reopening the whole budget. Two conventions keep it honest — it appears openly instead of being smuggled into other lines, and using it takes a decision by whoever owns the budget rather than a quiet withdrawal. Clients who ask for the reserve to be deleted are usually asking for the same risk back at a worse moment, and that trade deserves naming.

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

In planning terms, that means:

• Show the reserve openly; padding other lines destroys the credibility of the whole calculation
• Using it should require a decision by the budget owner, not a silent withdrawal
• Cutting the reserve does not remove the risk, it only removes the plan for it

With TillyGen

TillyGen makes the riskier parts of a plan visible, so the reserve is argued from the project instead of from routine.

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.