Plan a weather contingency

What this is about

Three things make weather cover work: an alternative that can genuinely be shot, a fixed moment when the call is made, and a named person who makes it. Miss any one and the crew stands in a car park waiting for a consensus. Exterior-heavy days need a cover set prepped to the same standard as the main plan, not sketched on the back of the schedule. And rain is rarely the actual problem: wind that ruins the sound, flat grey light that refuses to cut with yesterday's sunshine, and ground too wet for a tripod cost more shoot days than a downpour ever does.

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

In planning terms, that means:

• A cover set only works when it is prepped: permission, gear and cast for the alternative have to be arranged in advance, not improvised.
• Continuity is the hidden cost — sunshine on day one and flat cloud on day two rarely cut together inside one scene.
• The decision needs a deadline and an owner, because crew, catering and rentals all have to be redirected before people leave home.
• Wind and cold hurt before rain does: microphones, drones, hands and batteries all fail earlier than the camera.

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Mark every exterior in the schedule as weather-dependent and note what it actually needs: dry ground, a sun direction, calm air, or simply no downpour.
2. Choose a cover set for each exposed day — an interior scene, a second location, or a block of inserts that fills the same hours with the same crew.
3. Prepare the cover to the level of the main plan. A backup location without a key, a contact and a parking arrangement is a wish, not a plan.
4. Fix the decision point: who checks which forecast, at what hour, and who they tell. Put that sentence on the call sheet so it never becomes a debate.
5. Order weather gear as equipment rather than as an afterthought: rain covers for camera and lenses, wind protection for the mics, tarpaulins, a tent, towels, spare clothing.
6. Test the continuity risk before swapping days. Moving a scene into different light can cost more in the edit than half a lost day costs on set.
7. Brief the client on the weather logic before the shoot, so a change of plan on the day reads as competence instead of bad news.
8. Log what was shot in which conditions, so the edit knows which takes will and will not sit next to each other.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Treating 'we will see how it looks' as a plan, which means the whole crew waits in the rain for someone to take responsibility.
• Holding a backup location that was never confirmed for the exact day you would need it.
• Forgetting that the cover set needs the same cast, whose availability is tied to the original day.

With TillyGen

TillyGen makes swapping a day cheap: the schedule marks which blocks depend on weather and shows what a move does to the rest of the plan before you commit to it.

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.