Wrap report template

What this is about

A daily report describes one day while it is still fresh; the wrap report is the sum, written for the people who were not there. Two audiences read it. The producer needs the honest comparison against plan — days used, scenes not shot, overtime accumulated, incidents and damages — because that is what turns a finished shoot into a settled one. Post needs the handover facts: which material exists, what is missing, which scene was covered differently than planned. Written within a couple of days of wrap it takes an hour; written a month later it is archaeology performed on a group chat.

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:

• Planned versus actual across the whole shoot: shooting days used, scenes completed, scenes dropped and anything still owed as a pickup
• Time and people: accumulated overtime by department, rest periods that were tight, and days where the plan and the day diverged badly enough to explain
• Incidents, near misses and damages with dates, including anything reported to an insurer and the current status of each claim
• Returns and outstanding items: rental gear, vehicles, keys, location conditions, deposits and anything left behind at a location
• The handover state to post: what was delivered, when, with which manifest, and which paperwork — releases, reports, cue information — is still missing

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Collect the daily reports first and read them in one sitting, because the pattern across the shoot is invisible day by day.
2. Compare scenes shot against the schedule and mark every scene that was dropped, shortened or solved differently than planned.
3. Total the overtime by department and note the days where it happened, so the cost has a cause attached rather than just a number.
4. List incidents and damages with their date and current status, and attach the reports rather than summarising them from memory.
5. Walk through the returns: rental, vehicles, keys, deposits, and confirm each location was handed back in the agreed condition.
6. Write the post handover section against the manifests, naming what has been delivered and what post still needs to receive.
7. List the missing paperwork with the person responsible and a date, because unsigned releases are the item that blocks delivery months later.
8. Circulate it within a few days of wrap to production, accounting and post, and keep it with the project as the shoot's closing record.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Writing it weeks later, when the only sources left are a group chat and three people's differing recollections
• Reporting only what went well, which removes the one document that would have made the next budget realistic
• Missing releases noted as missing but assigned to nobody, so they stay missing until a broadcaster asks
• Treating it as an internal note and never sending it to post, who then rediscover every deviation on their own

With TillyGen

TillyGen already holds what was planned per day and per scene, so the wrap report starts from a real plan-versus-actual comparison instead of from a stack of PDFs someone has to add up.

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.