The 1st AD's guide to scheduling a film shoot in the UK

How to build a shooting schedule that survives contact with the shoot. Covering script breakdown, one-liners, back-scheduling, company moves, turnaround, and the UK-specific things that catch people out.

Scheduling a film shoot is one of those jobs where the output looks simple - a list of scenes in a particular order, with times and dates - but the thinking behind it is anything but. A good schedule is a piece of engineering. It has to balance creative priorities (the director's preferences), logistical constraints (locations, cast availability, equipment), crew welfare (turnaround, meal breaks, rest time), and budget realities (all of the above cost money). And it has to do all of that while remaining flexible enough to absorb the problems that arrive on the day.

This guide covers the core disciplines of shooting schedule preparation - from the first pass at a script breakdown through to finalising a schedule that the production can actually use. It's written for 1st ADs, but it's useful for anyone trying to understand how production scheduling works at the scene level.

In this guide

• Starting with the script breakdown
• Building your stripboard
• The one-liner: your scheduling foundation
• How to back-schedule from a delivery date
• Location logic and company moves
• Turnaround, company calls, and crew welfare
• UK-specific scheduling considerations
• How the shooting schedule connects to the wider production

Starting with the script breakdown

Before you can schedule anything, you need to understand what you're scheduling. The script breakdown is the process of going through the script scene by scene and identifying everything a scene requires: location, time of day, cast, supporting artists, vehicles, animals, special effects, stunts, playback, and any other elements that affect how long a scene will take or how much it will cost.

In practice, the breakdown is usually a shared exercise between the 1st AD and the production team. The 1st AD is primarily interested in what each scene needs logistically - cast, location, special requirements - while the production coordinator and line producer are tracking what those requirements mean for the budget. The two feed each other.

What to pull from each scene

Working through the script, for each scene you want to establish:

• Scene number - as written in the script
• INT or EXT - interior or exterior, which affects your day/night planning
• Location - where it takes place (which may be a different physical location from the set)
• Day or Night - as written in the script (D/N/DAY/NIGHT, or CONTINUOUS)
• Cast - which speaking characters appear in the scene
• Supporting artistes - how many, and any specific types required
• Special requirements - anything that adds complexity or cost (stunts, SFX, animals, vehicles, playback, specialist crew)
• Estimated pages - the script page count for the scene, which feeds your initial time estimate

Page count is a rough proxy for shooting time, and experienced ADs treat it as exactly that - rough. An action sequence might be three-eighths of a page and take all day. A dialogue scene might be five pages and wrap before lunch. Location, cast relationships, complexity, and the director's working style all affect the real time required far more than raw page count. But as a starting point for building the schedule, it's the best number you have.

Building your stripboard

The stripboard is the 1st AD's primary scheduling tool. Each strip represents a scene, carrying its key breakdown information - scene number, INT/EXT, day/night, location, cast - and the strips are arranged in shooting order to form the schedule. The name comes from the physical boards that were used before scheduling software existed, where paper strips could be physically moved around to reorder the schedule.

The logic of arranging strips is the core of scheduling. You're trying to minimise cost and complexity while maintaining creative coherence. That means:

• Grouping by location - shooting all scenes at a given location in the same block to avoid returning to it
• Managing cast availability - artists have contracted start and finish dates, and shooting has to respect them (or pay for extensions)
• Protecting day/night structure - keeping nights and days in manageable blocks rather than alternating, which is brutal on crew
• Back-loading complexity - ideally, the most difficult and risky sequences don't sit on day one, when cast and crew are still finding their rhythm
• Managing special requirements - stunt days, SFX days, crowd days often need specialist crew and equipment that can't easily be moved around

In practice, these priorities conflict constantly. The best location grouping might put your most complex scene on day two. The ideal cast schedule might conflict with the location plan. Scheduling is the process of finding the arrangement that best satisfies all of the competing constraints - knowing that the arrangement will change.

Day-out-of-days

The day-out-of-days (DOD) is the companion document to the stripboard. It shows, for each cast member, which shooting days they're required on - allowing you to see cast usage across the whole shoot at a glance. The DOD is what you send to cast agents when locking availability, and it's what production uses to confirm deal memos and calculate fees. It's also one of the first documents to become out of date when the schedule changes, which it will.

The one-liner: your scheduling foundation

The one-liner is a condensed version of the full schedule - typically one line per scene, showing scene number, brief description, location, INT/EXT, D/N, and cast. It's the document most people on a production mean when they say "the schedule." Directors, producers, department heads, and cast all read the one-liner. The full stripboard is usually the 1st AD's working document.

A good one-liner is readable at a glance. Scene descriptions should be genuinely descriptive - enough to understand the shape of the day without needing to cross-reference the script. "John and Sarah argue about the letter" is more useful than "INT. KITCHEN - D." Cast should be listed by character name, not actor name, because the one-liner circulates before cast are locked.

What the one-liner needs to communicate

The one-liner is doing several jobs simultaneously. For the director, it shows the shooting order and confirms that creative priorities have been respected. For the line producer, it shows the schedule is feasible and the budget assumptions hold. For department heads, it shows what they're preparing for and when. And for cast, it shows when they're required.

Getting the one-liner right in prep means fewer surprises on the day. The more your department heads can see from the one-liner - the more clearly it communicates the shape of each shooting day - the less you'll be explaining verbally at 6am when everyone needs to be thinking about their own job.

How to back-schedule from a delivery date

Back-scheduling is the practice of starting from the end - the delivery date or transmission date - and working backwards to determine when photography must be complete, which determines how long you have to shoot, which constrains the schedule you can build. It sounds obvious, but it's surprisingly common for shooting schedules to be built without a clear picture of the post schedule, leading to photography wrapping later than is actually viable.

The process works roughly like this:

• Delivery date - fixed by the broadcaster, distributor, or festival deadline
• Back from delivery: final audio mix and online (typically 1-2 weeks per episode)
• Back from there: grade and sound edit (variable, often 2-4 weeks)
• Back from there: picture lock
• Back from there: offline edit (typically 6-12 weeks for a feature, 2-4 weeks per episode for a series)
• Back from there: assembly cut, which requires the shooting to be complete
• Back from there: principal photography wrap date

That wrap date is your constraint. Everything in the shooting schedule has to fit between the first day of principal photography and that date. If it doesn't, something has to give - either the post schedule compresses, photography extends (which almost always costs money), or material gets cut. Better to surface that conflict in prep than discover it on day twenty of a twenty-two-day shoot.

Working out your page-per-day rate

Once you know how many shooting days you have, you can calculate your target page rate - the number of script pages you need to average per day to complete photography on time. For most drama, this is somewhere between two and four pages per day, depending on complexity, budget, and the director's working style. Action-heavy or effects-heavy productions often run slower. Dialogue-driven drama can run faster.

The page rate calculation is a useful reality check on the schedule. If the math requires five pages a day to wrap on time, and your production has never shot faster than three, either the schedule needs more days or the script needs to be shorter. That conversation is much more productive in prep than it is at the end of week three.

Location logic and company moves

Location scheduling is where the theoretical schedule meets physical reality. In a perfect world, you'd shoot every scene at a given location consecutively, then move to the next location and repeat. In practice, you're balancing location availability, cast schedules, travel times, build times, weather dependency, and the fact that some locations simply don't work on certain days or at certain times.

Minimising company moves

A company move - moving the whole unit from one location to another - is expensive and time-consuming. Travel eats into shooting time, wrap and prep at each location add to the day, and the logistical complexity of moving large amounts of equipment and personnel creates opportunities for things to go wrong. The general principle is to minimise company moves within a day, and to ensure that when moves are necessary, they're planned carefully enough that they don't eat disproportionately into the shooting day.

When a day includes a company move, you need to know:

• Travel time between the two locations in real conditions - not Google Maps distance, but actual drive time with a unit vehicle at the relevant time of day
• What each crew member needs to do at wrap on location one before they can leave
• What each department needs to set up at location two before you can shoot
• Whether catering can be accommodated at both locations, or whether you need to build a lunch stop into the day
• The total time the move will take - and whether that's been factored into the scenes you've put either side of it

Tech recces

The technical recce is where the schedule gets pressure-tested against reality. You visit each location with relevant heads of department - director, DOP, production designer, sound, locations, 1st AD - and work through the specific requirements of each scene. What you learn on a tech recce almost always results in schedule changes: some scenes are faster to shoot than you thought, others are slower. Some locations have constraints that weren't obvious from the script or from photographs.

The schedule you have going into the tech recce is rarely the schedule you have coming out of it. That's normal and useful. The purpose of a tech recce is exactly this - to surface the problems while there's still time to solve them in the schedule rather than on the day.

Turnaround, company calls, and crew welfare

Turnaround is the minimum rest period between wrap on one shooting day and the first crew call on the next. In UK drama and film, the standard minimum turnaround is eleven hours, often contractually specified in crew deals. A twelve-hour turnaround is more comfortable. Anything less than eleven hours is a breach of agreement, requires specific consent, and needs to be flagged clearly.

The practical impact of turnaround on scheduling is significant. A day that wraps late pushes the next morning's call time back - which reduces the number of hours available to shoot the following day, which can push that day's wrap later, which pushes the next call later again. Turnaround debt compounds. Productions that consistently wrap late get progressively more compressed as the shoot goes on.

Company calls and first call

The company call is the collective call time for the unit - usually the time the majority of the crew are expected to be on set. Individual department calls may be earlier (camera and art department often arrive before the company call to have sets and equipment ready) or later (cast calls typically fall after the company call, once the set is prepared). The first unit call is set by the 1st AD in consultation with the director and the line producer, and it forms the basis for calculating the working day.

Setting the call time requires understanding how much prep each department needs before the first shot of the day. An interior set that's been lit and dressed the night before needs less morning prep time than an exterior location that requires equipment to be loaded in from scratch. Rushing prep to get the first shot away early is a false economy - you save fifteen minutes in the morning and spend an hour dealing with the consequences.

Grace periods and overtime

Most UK crew agreements include a grace period - typically thirty minutes after the agreed wrap time - before additional payments kick in. Overtime is expensive and morale-destroying in equal measure. A crew that regularly works into overtime on one production will be less available for your next one. Managing the shooting day so that the unit wraps on time is one of the most practical contributions a 1st AD makes to a production.

UK-specific scheduling considerations

Shooting in the UK has specific characteristics that affect how schedules are built. Some are practical, some contractual, some just a function of the weather.

Daylight and weather

The UK's latitude means day length varies dramatically across the year. A shoot in December has around eight hours of usable daylight. A shoot in June has closer to sixteen. For exterior-heavy productions, this affects everything from call times to how many exterior scenes can realistically be scheduled per day. Any production planning significant exterior work in winter needs to understand their effective shooting window - and plan accordingly.

Weather cover is the industry term for an interior scene that can be substituted when exterior conditions make shooting impossible. Every schedule that includes exterior scenes should have weather cover identified - scenes that work in the same location and with the same cast, are interiors, and can be moved to replace the rained-off exterior. A production that goes to a location on a night that it rains and has nothing to shoot because all the weather cover was in the studio is an expensive problem that prep should have solved.

Bank holidays

UK bank holidays are a scheduling consideration that catches international productions out more often than you'd expect. A unit shooting through a bank holiday weekend without accounting for it in the schedule, crew agreements, and budget will encounter complications - both in crew availability and in additional costs for holiday rates. England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland have different bank holiday schedules, which matters if your production is shooting across borders.

Child and young person regulations

The regulations governing the working hours of children and young people on UK productions are specific and non-negotiable. A child's working hours, including rest periods, travel, and education requirements, are set by local authority licence conditions - not by the production schedule. Any production working with minors needs to establish the licence conditions for each child before scheduling their scenes, and needs a chaperone on set whenever a child is present.

The general rule of thumb: scenes involving children should be scheduled for when their working hours are least constrained (typically mornings on school days, or full days during school holidays) and should be backed up by weather cover that doesn't involve those children, so that if the scene moves, the child isn't being kept on set unnecessarily.

Union agreements and BECTU

BECTU (the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Communications and Theatre Union) has agreements with the major broadcasters and production companies that govern working conditions, hours, and pay for crew on productions that have signed up to those agreements. For the 1st AD, the most relevant provisions are typically around daily working hours, turnaround, meal breaks, and overtime rates.

Productions that aren't covered by a BECTU agreement are still expected to meet basic working time regulations under UK law. The 48-hour working week average, 11-hour daily rest requirements, and 20-minute break entitlements all apply regardless of what the crew deal says. Schedule-building that ignores these is both legally problematic and practically counterproductive.

How the shooting schedule connects to the wider production

The shooting schedule the 1st AD builds is a detailed, scene-level document. It tells the crew what to shoot, in what order, at what location, with which cast. But it exists within a wider production context that the 1st AD reads from rather than builds - the macro production timeline managed by the line producer or production manager.

That wider timeline shows the shape of the whole production: when prep starts and ends, how long photography runs, how post is structured, when each episode or deliverable is expected to be complete. The 1st AD's work sits inside the photography phase of that timeline. Understanding the constraints on either side of photography - how much prep time exists, what the post pipeline looks like, where the delivery dates sit - helps a 1st AD build a schedule that reflects the production's real situation rather than an idealised version of it.

The macro timeline is also the document that shows how your photography wrap date was arrived at. If it feels tight, the macro schedule is where you can see what has to move to create more room - whether that's a compressed post schedule, an earlier prep start, or a budget conversation about additional shooting days.

On a well-run production, the line producer's macro schedule and the 1st AD's shooting schedule are maintained in parallel and kept consistent. Changes to photography that affect delivery dates get reflected in the macro schedule. Changes to the delivery dates that affect photography wrap get communicated to the 1st AD. When these two schedules drift out of sync - as they do on productions where they're held by different people and not shared readily - problems accumulate without anyone having a complete picture of the situation.

Common questions

How long does it take to build a shooting schedule from scratch?

For a feature, expect to spend the majority of the first week of prep on the breakdown and initial schedule, with multiple revisions across the prep period as locations, cast, and creative decisions are confirmed. For a TV episode, an experienced 1st AD might produce a first draft schedule in a day or two once the breakdown is complete - but it'll be revised significantly before the tech recce, and again after it. Budget at least two or three full rounds of revision before a schedule is ready to be locked.

What's the difference between a shooting schedule and a stripboard?

The stripboard is the tool - a visual arrangement of scene strips in shooting order. The shooting schedule is the document produced from it, formatted for distribution to the unit. The one-liner is the most widely circulated version of the shooting schedule. Some productions use "stripboard" and "shooting schedule" interchangeably; technically the stripboard is the working tool and the schedule is the output.

How many pages per day is realistic for a UK drama?

The honest answer is that it varies enormously. Two to three pages per day is a reasonable working assumption for a dialogue-driven UK drama with a mid-range budget. Action sequences, special effects, complex visual work, or a director who works slowly can drop that to less than a page. Straightforward dialogue scenes with experienced cast can run faster. The more useful question is: what does your specific production require, and does that match the resources available?

What software do UK 1st ADs typically use for scheduling?

Movie Magic Scheduling remains widely used in UK film and TV, particularly on higher-budget productions. Gorilla and Yamdu are used on some productions. Some 1st ADs work with spreadsheets for smaller projects. The specific tool matters less than having a systematic process for the breakdown, a clear one-liner that can be revised quickly, and a day-out-of-days that stays current as the schedule changes.

How does the 1st AD's schedule relate to what the line producer manages?

The 1st AD manages the scene-level shooting schedule - which scenes, in what order, on which days, at which locations. The line producer manages the macro production timeline - how prep, photography, and post connect, and how the whole production maps to delivery dates. Both are legitimate scheduling disciplines, and on any significant production they're handled by different people using different tools. The two schedules need to be consistent with each other - particularly around the photography wrap date - but they're built and maintained separately.

What's the minimum turnaround for UK film and TV crews?

The standard minimum turnaround is eleven hours between wrap and the next call time, and this is typically specified in UK crew agreements. Twelve hours is more comfortable and more common on well-run productions. Going below eleven hours requires specific crew consent, should be agreed in advance rather than imposed on the day, and is a signal that something in the schedule needs to change - either the previous day wrapped too late, or the next day's call is set too early.

How should weather cover scenes be chosen?

Good weather cover has a few characteristics: it should use the same cast as the exterior scenes it might replace (so no additional travel or call time requirements), it should be interiors at a location already being used that day (to avoid a company move), and it should be scenes you were going to shoot soon anyway (so moving them forward doesn't create a cascade of rescheduling elsewhere). Identifying weather cover in prep - and making sure it's clearly marked in the schedule - means decisions on the day happen quickly rather than requiring thirty minutes of problem-solving in the rain.