Daily production report template

What this is about

Drift on a shoot is quiet. Fifteen minutes here, a postponed scene there, and by day four the plan describes a different production. The daily report is the instrument that measures drift while it is still correctable: scenes planned against scenes shot, first shot time, meal times, wrap, overtime per person, incidents worth remembering. Written at wrap by one owner, it takes ten minutes. Its value compounds — the reports of this shoot are the calibration data for quoting the next 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

Where this differs from the general case:

• Scenes and setups planned versus completed, with dropped ones named and their new home in the schedule stated
• The day's timeline in timestamps — crew call, first shot, meals, wrap — because feelings about a day lie and clocks do not
• Overtime per person and department, recorded daily while it is a fact instead of monthly when it is a dispute
• Incidents, injuries, damage and near-misses in factual language, plus media volumes handed to the DIT

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Name the owner before the shoot starts — usually the AD or production manager — and protect their ten minutes at wrap.
2. Prefill the report from the call sheet during the day: planned scenes, call times and locations are already known.
3. Record the timestamps as they happen; a report written from memory at 22:00 rounds everything toward harmony.
4. At wrap, mark every planned scene as shot, partial or dropped, and write where dropped material moves.
5. Add overtime, incidents and media counts, then send the report to production and producer the same evening.
6. Once the job ends, read all reports in sequence — the pattern across days is the honest review of the plan.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Euphemistic reporting that hides drift until it is too big to hide and too late to fix
• Writing three reports on Friday for the whole week, from a memory that has already forgiven everything
• Recording what was shot but not where dropped scenes went, so they silently vanish from the film

With TillyGen

With the plan living in TillyGen, the report has its reference built in: the day's target scenes come from the schedule, and deviations are visible against it instead of against memory.

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.