Crew booking confirmation template

What this is about

Most crew deals begin verbally and stay verbal until the invoice arrives — which is precisely where the disagreement starts. The confirmation, often called a deal memo, freezes the four things people reliably remember differently: what the rate covers, how many hours a day contains, what happens to hour eleven, and who pays if the shoot moves. Brevity is the design goal. A single page returned signed within a day is worth more than a full contract that sits unread until the week of the shoot, because the risk it removes is a scheduling risk, not a legal one.

A template is the starting point, not the goal: once it has been filled in by hand twice, it is worth asking whether the document should come out of the plan instead.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• Role, name and every engaged day listed as a concrete date — prep, travel and standby days separately from full shooting days, never as a span
• The rate with its unit and what a day actually contains in hours, plus where overtime begins and at which multiplier it is settled
• Cancellation terms as a ladder with dates: what the production owes a week out, and what it owes the evening before
• Kit, vehicle and consumables as their own line items with their own amounts, kept out of the personal fee for bookkeeping reasons
• One reference line stating that credit, footage rights and usage follow the main production agreement, not this page

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Confirm availability by phone, then send the written version the same day — recollection of what was agreed decays faster than anyone plans for.
2. Enter every engaged day as a dated line and label its type, so a travel day is never silently invoiced as a shooting day.
3. State rate, covered hours and the overtime rule in one block, with the multiplier written out instead of implied by custom.
4. Add the cancellation ladder with real dates, name who must be informed and through which channel a cancellation counts as delivered.
5. List kit and vehicle rental as separate lines with their own daily amounts and note who insures them during the engagement.
6. Send it as a signable file, ask for return by a named date, and file the countersigned copy next to the crew list.
7. When days shift, issue a newly numbered version rather than editing the old one in an email thread.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Booking by phone and confirming three weeks later, by which time the freelancer has accepted a second job across two of those dates
• A day rate with no hour definition, so the argument at wrap is about what each side assumed rather than about what was written
• Kit rental folded into the fee, which turns a clean freelance invoice into a bookkeeping correction months afterwards

With TillyGen

TillyGen knows from the schedule which role is genuinely needed on which day, so each confirmation is generated per person with real dates — and when the plan moves, it shows you whose engaged days changed.

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.