Write a wrap report

What this is about

Wrap reports exist for three readers who are not on set: the production office reconciling budgets, the insurer or lawyer if an incident grows teeth, and the future you planning the next comparable job. All three need the same qualities — written the same evening, structured the same way every day, honest about deviations. The report is not prose and not a defense; it is a snapshot. Ten focused minutes during wrap produce it. The alternative, reconstructing a shoot from chat history and invoices two months later, produces archaeology.

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:

• Same template every day: scenes planned versus shot, hours per person, incidents, media status, notes for tomorrow — the reader finds everything where it was yesterday
• Deviations carry reasons and consequences: not 'scene 12 dropped' but 'scene 12 dropped, location lost light, needs pickup at office location'
• The media line is binary and named: both backups verified by whom, or not — a wrap report without media status is decoration
• Incidents get facts, not judgments: what happened, when, who was involved, what was done — the insurer reads this sentence years later

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Set up the template before day one and prefill each day from the schedule: planned scenes, booked crew, locations. The evening's work is then correction, not creation.
2. Collect during the day, not at the end: a note when a scene drops, a photo of the incident, the actual lunch time. The report assembles itself from breadcrumbs.
3. Write during wrap while the crew loads — the ten minutes exist, and every hour of distance costs detail. The report sent from the couch at midnight is a summary of a memory.
4. Report shot versus planned per scene with a word on every gap. This list is tomorrow's planning input and the honest record the invoice will later lean on.
5. Record hours as worked, including the half hour past wrap, per function. Overtime that never enters a report becomes overtime that was never owed.
6. State media status explicitly: cards offloaded, both copies verified, by whom, where the drives sleep tonight. One sentence, enormous downstream value.
7. Flag decisions needed before tomorrow's call — the pickup that needs a slot, the prop that needs replacing, the client approval still open. The report is also an escalation channel.
8. Send to a fixed list at a fixed time and archive with the production documents. A report that lives in one inbox is a report that half the team never saw.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Writing reports days later from memory, when they defend instead of describe
• Soft-pedaling an incident that the insurer later reads with hard eyes
• Reports sent to nobody in particular and archived nowhere at all

With TillyGen

Because the day was planned in TillyGen, the report's hardest column — planned versus shot — already exists: the plan with its marked changes is the deviation list, exportable as PDF for the file.

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.