Prep Day

What this is about

Every department needs its own. Camera checks the body, lenses, filters and monitoring at the rental house and shoots a test. Art builds and dresses. Costume runs fittings with cast. Grip and electric load the truck and pre-rig a location. These days are negotiated separately in the deal memo, often at a different rate to a shooting day, and they are the first thing an inexperienced production cuts — right up to the morning when four lenses turn out not to match and the day starts an hour late.

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:

• A prep day is a separate booked day; prep and wrap are the hours around a shooting day, and the two are billed differently.
• Camera prep is the one nobody should skip: it is the last moment to reject faulty glass without losing shooting time.
• Prep days belong in the schedule with a date and a location, not as a vague note that the crew will sort it out.

With TillyGen

TillyGen plans prep days as their own entries in the schedule, with the department and the location they belong to.

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.