Avoid overtime

What this is about

Chronic overtime has a reputation as dedication, and that reputation protects it from scrutiny. Look closer and it is usually arithmetic: a day planned at a setup rate the crew has never once achieved, zero margin between company moves, and the emotionally biggest shot scheduled last. The costs are real even when nobody invoices them — slower mornings, sloppy last hours, crews that quietly raise their rates for you next time. Treating the day plan as a promise to end on time changes how it gets built, and that is where avoidance actually happens.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• Plan with the setup rate your crew actually achieves, taken from past days, not from the version of them that exists in quotes
• The hard out belongs in the morning briefing, said out loud — a wrap time nobody heard is a wrap time nobody defends
• Front-load the must-haves: the material the film cannot live without shoots before lunch, not in the golden hour of exhaustion
• Overtime is a decision with a price tag, taken by a named person — never a drift that everyone noticed and nobody owned

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Build the day from evidence: count the setups, multiply by the minutes your last three shoots actually needed per setup class, add moves and meals, and see whether the day fits before anyone is booked.
2. Declare the hard out in the morning briefing together with the reason — location closes, crew turnaround, child care, next day's call. Reasons make wrap times defensible under pressure.
3. Sequence must-have material into the first two-thirds of the day. What remains after the afternoon check should be droppable without anyone calling the client.
4. Install a mandatory midpoint check: at lunch, compare shots done against shots planned. A morning that ran twenty percent long predicts the afternoon precisely — react at noon, not at dusk.
5. Agree the wrap-minus-two rule in advance: two hours before hard out, the remaining list is reconciled and someone names what gets simplified. This meeting takes four minutes and saves the evening.
6. Watch the gaps, not just the setups — load-ins, company moves, meal logistics and re-lights are where days quietly bleed. Plan them as real blocks with real durations.
7. If overtime becomes unavoidable, make it a decision: the responsible person names the cost, the client or production approves it, and the extra time gets a concrete goal instead of an open end.
8. Track recurring overtime causes across projects. The location type that always runs late, the setup class that always doubles — next quarter's schedules should know what this quarter learned.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Scheduling the hero shot last because the crew will be warmed up by then
• Call sheets built on the assumption that nothing will take longer than intended
• Overtime as a habit nobody decided, priced at zero until the crew invoices arrive

With TillyGen

A schedule generated in TillyGen carries a duration for every setup and shows the day's total against the hard out while you plan — the overtime conversation happens on screen in prep, where it costs nothing.

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.