Get a filming permit

What this is about

The permit question splits along ownership: private ground needs the owner or manager, public ground needs the authority responsible for that exact surface — and a single frame can touch several. A street scene may involve the road authority for the lane, the city for the pavement, and transit police if a platform edges into shot. The rules of thumb that hold across cities: crew size, tripods, rigs and vehicles usually decide whether a shoot counts as permit-worthy, lead times vary widely, and insurance proof is requested almost everywhere. The productive attitude treats the permit office as a collaborator with a calendar, not an obstacle.

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:

• Ownership decides the counterpart: owner or facility manager on private ground, the responsible authority on public ground — sometimes several per frame.
• Scope drives the requirement: a handheld camera and two people are treated differently than tripods, lights, rigs and parked production vehicles.
• The permit's conditions bind the shoot: times, areas, noise limits and safety requirements travel onto the call sheet.
• Drone flights carry their own legal layer on top of the ground permit and are never covered by it automatically.

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Map every location in the schedule against ownership: private, public, or mixed. Each category has a different counterpart and a different clock.
2. Identify the exact authority for public ground — city film office where one exists, otherwise the department managing that surface. A film office, where available, shortcuts everything.
3. Ask for requirements and lead times before filling in anything; a five-minute call prevents the wrong form from costing a week.
4. Submit the application with the details offices actually weigh: dates and times, precise area, crew and vehicle count, equipment scope, and proof of liability insurance.
5. Budget the fees and the conditions: some permits carry costs, most carry obligations — times, noise, walkway widths — that belong in the schedule.
6. Plan the fallback while waiting: an alternative location or date, so a rejection changes the plan instead of collapsing it.
7. Carry the permit on set, brief the team on its conditions, and name one person who talks to police or officials if they appear.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Assuming 'small crew, no tripod' means no permit needed anywhere — the threshold differs by city and surface.
• Applying for the frame but not the footprint: the shot is legal, the parked van and cable run are not.
• Treating the permit's conditions as fine print — the 07:00 noise limit is why the schedule just broke.

With TillyGen

TillyGen keeps permits attached to locations and days in the production plan, so an unapproved motif is visible as a risk in the schedule instead of a surprise on set.

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.