Prep and Wrap

What this is about

This is why the shooting day is always longer than the shooting time. Grip and electric arrive before general call to unload and rig, camera builds and checks, and at the end the same people are still coiling cable when the actors have gone. Those hours count towards the working day and towards turnaround, which is where inexperienced plans go wrong: a crew called at seven and wrapped at nineteen has not worked a twelve-hour day if the truck is not loaded until twenty. Departments therefore get their own call times, staggered around the general one.

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:

• Prep and wrap sit inside a shooting day; a prep day is a separate booked day before principal photography with its own rate.
• Stagger department calls in the schedule instead of leaving crews to arrive early unpaid and unrecorded.
• Wrap time is the part everyone underestimates, and it is the part that decides whether tomorrow's call has to move.

With TillyGen

TillyGen plans department calls with rig and derig time, so the day length in the schedule matches the day people actually work.

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.