Meal Penalty

What this is about

The clock starts at general call, and the first AD is the one watching it. Break windows are set in the applicable agreement, the German Arbeitszeitgesetz requires a break once working time passes six hours, and productions add their own terms on top. When a setup runs long, the choice is to break on time and lose momentum, or to push through and pay every person on the unit for it. A walking meal is sometimes agreed as a compromise, but that too usually has to be negotiated rather than assumed.

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:

• A penalty can hit inside a perfectly normal-length day: it is about when the break falls, not about how long the day is.
• It is calculated per head, so a large unit turns a twenty-minute delay into a real line in the cost report.
• Announce the break window on the call sheet. Crews accept a shifted lunch far better than a lunch that silently disappears.

With TillyGen

TillyGen puts the break window into the day plan, so a setup that would push past it is visible before the day starts.

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.