Post-production schedule template

What this is about

Unlike a shooting schedule, a post schedule is mostly made of waiting: for feedback, for a music clearance, for the one approval that unblocks the grade. That makes dependencies the real content of the plan. Sound design, colour and titles all sit behind picture lock, and moving lock by three days moves everything behind it by three days — which is invisible in a list of tasks and obvious in a plan built as a chain. The second half of the job is naming the review rounds: how many are included, who may comment in each, and by when.

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:

• The chain in dependency order — ingest, assembly, rough cut, fine cut, picture lock, sound and grade, graphics, mastering, QC, delivery
• Picture lock marked as a hard gate, with a written note that colour and mix start after it and that reopening the cut restarts both
• A fixed number of review rounds, each with a delivery date, a response deadline and one named person who consolidates the feedback
• Fixed-duration items booked as blocks rather than estimated: mix stage days, grading suite time, QC, subtitling and any external supplier
• Buffer placed as a visible block before delivery, not distributed invisibly across the tasks where it will be spent unnoticed

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Start at the air date or campaign start and write the delivery date at least one working block earlier, because delivery itself takes time.
2. Walk backwards and place the items whose duration is booked rather than guessed: QC, mastering, mix days, grading time, subtitling.
3. Set picture lock as a dated gate and mark every task that cannot begin before it, so the cost of moving lock is visible on the page.
4. Enter the review rounds by number, each with the date the version goes out and the date feedback must be back, in writing.
5. Name one approver per round who consolidates comments, and state that contradictory feedback is resolved before it reaches the edit.
6. Add the external dependencies that are not yours — music clearance, voice-over talent, client legal — with their own owners and dates.
7. Place the buffer as its own block before delivery and defend it as a task, not as slack anyone may borrow from.
8. Re-issue the plan whenever a response deadline is missed, showing the new delivery date rather than absorbing the delay silently.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Review rounds with a send date but no response deadline, so the client's silence quietly consumes the buffer that was meant for finishing
• Starting the grade before lock, then regrading the shots that changed and paying for the suite twice
• Buffer scattered across every task, where it is spent within the first week and cannot be found when it is needed
• An unlimited number of rounds implied by never writing the number down, which turns every further request into a favour

With TillyGen

TillyGen carries the delivery formats and versions agreed at briefing into the post plan, so the schedule already contains every cutdown and language version instead of discovering them in the last week.

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.