TillyGen and Google Calendar

What this is about

Google Calendar is where availability lives for teams on Google Workspace: shared calendars per team, invitations with accept and decline, and the free-busy view that shows who can even make the proposed day. In the production workflow it plays two moments. During prep it answers the feasibility question — which of the candidate shoot days survive contact with the crew's calendars. After the schedule locks in TillyGen, the confirmed days travel into a shared production calendar, either entered as events or brought in via Google Calendar's CSV import, so every crew member's week shows the shoot before conflicts get booked over it.

An integration is good when nobody talks about it any more: the data is where it is needed and nobody exports anything.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• Google Calendar imports events from a CSV file, so the confirmed shoot days from the TillyGen schedule arrive as a batch instead of one by one
• A dedicated production calendar keeps shoot events separable from private ones — crew subscribes for the project, unsubscribes at wrap
• The free-busy view answers during prep which candidate days even stand a chance before the schedule commits to them
• Each event description carries the TillyGen plan link, so the calendar entry leads to the call sheet, not the other way around

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. During prep, check candidate shoot days against the crew's free-busy view before the schedule in TillyGen commits to specific dates.
2. Once the schedule locks, export the shoot days and bring them into a dedicated production calendar — via CSV import or entered as a batch.
3. Put the plan link and call time into each event description; the calendar states when, the call sheet states everything else.
4. Share the production calendar with crew and let acceptances confirm that the dates actually landed in personal calendars.
5. When a day moves in TillyGen, fix the calendar event in the same sitting and let the update notify everyone who subscribed.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• The schedule moves and the calendar does not — the crew's phones now defend a shoot day that no longer exists
• Shoot details written into event descriptions instead of linked: three edits later, the calendar contradicts the call sheet

With TillyGen

The schedule in TillyGen decides the days; Google Calendar defends them in everyone's week. Dates flow outward only — and every date change in the plan triggers one calendar correction, immediately.

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.