Plan a company move

What this is about

Schedules show a company move as whitespace; sets experience it as a production number of its own: wrap the gear, load in a known order, drive, find parking, unload, rebuild — while the client wonders why nobody is shooting. Whether a day holds one move or two often decides whether it holds at all. The craft has two halves: first reduce moves in the schedule by regrouping scenes, then give the unavoidable ones real durations, an owner, and advance work at the receiving end, so the convoy arrives to open doors instead of a locked gate.

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:

• Moves are line items with durations and addresses, not whitespace between scheduling blocks.
• The drive is rarely the cost — packing, parking and re-rigging at the far end are.
• One deleted move buys more time back than an hour of optimizing the shooting order within a location.
• Advance work at the second location turns a convoy arrival into a rolling start instead of a second scout.

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Count the moves in the schedule first and challenge each one: can scenes regroup so the day stays at one location? The cheapest move is the deleted one.
2. Give every remaining move a staged duration: wrap, pack, load, drive, park, unload, re-rig. Estimated stage by stage, the drive usually turns out to be the shortest part.
3. Lay a move over the meal break only if people still genuinely eat and rest — a move that consumes the break pays for itself in afternoon speed loss.
4. Advance the next location: one person confirms parking, access, keys and power before the convoy leaves, so problems get solved by phone instead of by thirty waiting people.
5. Write parking and load-in for every vehicle into the call sheet — addresses, gate codes, contact numbers — instead of leaving them in one person's chat history.
6. Define the packing order so the first things needed at location two are the last things loaded. Camera and grip decide their case logic before the day, not during it.
7. Name a move captain who calls the wrap of location one and the readiness of location two. Moves without an owner fray at both ends.
8. Afterwards, compare planned versus actual move times and keep the numbers — the next schedule is only as good as the last measurement.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Scheduling a move as 'twenty minutes' because that is what the map says about the drive.
• Nobody owns the move, so the wrap drags and the convoy leaves in three waves.
• Arriving at an unconfirmed second location — locked gate, no parking, keyholder on lunch.

With TillyGen

TillyGen treats moves as first-class schedule items with durations and addresses, so a day with two moves visibly carries fewer setups than a day with none.

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.