Plan a multi-city shoot

What this is about

Geography adds three problems a single-location shoot never has. Travel consumes shoot days and rest time, and the hours spent moving count against what people can sensibly work. Crews change from city to city, so the same brief has to be transmitted again and again to people who were not there last time. And the material has to cut together despite different rooms, different daylight and often different cameras. None of that is solved on the day; it is solved by the order of the cities, a written look specification, and knowing which roles travel with the project.

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:

• Travel days are shoot days that produce nothing. Plan them explicitly instead of hiding them at the edges of other days.
• Rest periods apply after long drives too — eleven hours between wrap and the next call is the reference point, not a nicety.
• Flying a core crew buys consistency; hiring locally buys knowledge of the city. Most projects mix travelling leads with local support.
• A written look specification — camera, lens set, height, background type, lighting scheme — is what keeps six cities inside one film.

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Order the cities by geography and light rather than by client preference, then price what the route costs in travel days before agreeing to it.
2. Decide which roles travel and which are hired locally. A travelling director and DoP with local grip and sound is the usual compromise and it protects the look.
3. Write a look specification everyone works from: camera and codec, lens set, interview height, background type, lighting scheme and audio setup.
4. Standardise the setup so an unfamiliar room can be rebuilt in under an hour, and shoot a reference frame in the first city to match everything against.
5. Plan the equipment logic: what travels with the team, what is rented in each city, and who verifies the local rental before the crew lands.
6. Build the schedule around arrival and rest rather than shooting hours alone. A late wrap and an early call in the next city is a plan that fails quietly.
7. Give each city a local contact who has actually stood in the location, because a scout by photo misses parking, noise and the lift that does not exist.
8. Back up the material in every city before travelling on, and keep one copy away from the person carrying the camera bags.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Sequencing cities by whoever answered the email first, then paying for two additional travel days.
• Changing the interview background style per city, so the finished film looks like four unrelated projects.
• Assuming a local rental house stocks the same lens set, and matching nothing when it turns out not to.

With TillyGen

TillyGen schedules across locations, so travel blocks, rest periods and the setups per city sit in one plan — and reordering the route shows what it actually saves.

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.