A call sheet's job is simple: make sure every single person on a shoot knows where to be, when to be there, and what's expected of them, without a single follow-up text. When it works, nobody notices it. When it's missing something, the whole day feels it: someone's late because they didn't know parking was three blocks from the actual location, or the whole crew is standing around because nobody knew the shot list started with the hardest setup.
The essentials
- Call time and estimated wrap time, not just when people arrive, but a realistic sense of how long the day runs.
- Location, with a separate parking location if they're not the same place. Include a map link, not just an address. Not everyone's maps app resolves ambiguous addresses the same way.
- A day-of contact number for whoever's actually reachable if someone's running late or lost, which is not always the same person who booked the job.
- Weather forecast, for anything shooting outdoors, plus a rain plan or backup location if one exists.
- Full crew and talent list, with roles and call times if they differ from the general call time.
The runsheet
The hour-by-hour (or setup-by-setup) breakdown of the day: what's being shot, in what order, and roughly how long each setup should take. A realistic runsheet accounts for setup and breakdown time between shots, not just the shots themselves. An over-optimistic schedule is how a shoot ends up running two hours over with the last three setups rushed.
Wardrobe, props, and shot-specific notes
Anything talent or crew need to bring or prepare that isn't obvious from the brief alone: a specific outfit change, a prop only one person is responsible for bringing, a shot that needs a second person to hold a reflector. The more of this that's written down ahead of time, the less gets solved on the spot, on the clock, with everyone waiting.
Send it early, and keep it live
A call sheet sent the night before is a call sheet nobody has time to actually read. Send it with enough lead time that people can flag a conflict, and make it easy to update if a location or time shifts. A call sheet that goes stale the moment plans change is worse than no call sheet, because people trust an outdated version. A shareable link that always reflects the current plan (rather than a static PDF someone printed two days ago) solves this cleanly, which is exactly why SetBook's call sheets are built as a live link every crew member can check from their phone, not a document that goes stale the moment something shifts.