Plan catering and logistics

What this is about

A crew that eats at a sensible hour keeps working accurately. A crew that eats at four in the afternoon starts making the small mistakes that surface in the edit. So the planning question is where the break sits in the shooting order, not what is on the menu. Around that sit the unglamorous items: drinking water within reach of set, a toilet that actually exists, somewhere dry to sit, and parking that does not turn into a permit hunt at seven in the morning. On locations without infrastructure, every one of these becomes something you transport rather than something you find.

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:

• Meal breaks belong in the schedule as blocks, placed between setups rather than in the middle of a lighting change.
• Dietary requirements get collected with the crew booking, not asked about on the morning of the shoot.
• A location with no kitchen, water or toilets turns catering into a transport job — you are bringing infrastructure, not lunch.
• Parking distance, load-in route and lift access shape the call time more than the first setup does.

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Read the schedule and place the meal break where the day pauses anyway — after a location move or a finished block, never inside a setup that is half lit.
2. Count everybody who eats: crew, cast, client, drivers, the location owner. Guest lists grow on the day, and short catering is remembered longer than the film.
3. Collect dietary requirements at booking and treat them as fixed. A vegan option that arrives as a side salad counts as no option at all.
4. Check the location for basics — running water, power for a kettle, toilets, a covered place to sit — and rent whatever is missing before the day, not on it.
5. Plan drinks separately from food: water in reach of set at all times, something hot for cold locations, and a rubbish plan so the site is handed back clean.
6. Settle parking and load-in early: who parks where, how far the gear travels from van to set, whether a lift, a permit or a loading window is involved.
7. Give the job to a named person with time for it. Catering without an owner becomes the producer's problem at the exact moment the producer is needed on set.
8. Confirm delivery windows against the schedule the day before, including a phone number for the driver that is not the director's.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Ordering for the crew list and forgetting client, drivers and the location contact, then dividing six meals among eight people.
• Placing the break where the caterer prefers it instead of where the shooting order allows it.
• Assuming a location has toilets because it has a door.

With TillyGen

Because TillyGen's schedule shows where blocks and company moves sit, you place the meal break inside the plan instead of improvising it — headcount and timing come from one document.

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.