Free Call Sheet Template: What Goes on Every Line

So you’ve got a shoot day coming up and you need to get a call sheet out to everyone. Where do you start, and what has to be on it?

We’re going to go through a call sheet section by section and break down what goes on every line and why it’s there. We’ll cover the header, call times and meals, weather and light, your schedule, cast, crew, and the stuff that belongs on a second page. And you can download our template to follow along with it open in front of you.

The best call sheets we’ve been handed weren’t from the biggest productions. Some of the smoothest shoots I’ve worked on were shorts running on favours and a borrowed van, and what they had in common was one page of paper sent the night before, put together by someone who’d thought about the day from the point of view of the people reading it.

What is a call sheet?

Call sheet definition

A call sheet is the daily document that tells your cast and crew where to be, what time to get there, and what you’re shooting once they arrive. You make a new one for every shooting day, you send it the evening before, and it’s the one piece of paperwork on a film set that everybody reads.

It’s worth separating it from your shooting schedule, because those two get mixed up a lot. Your schedule covers the whole production and it mostly lives with your AD and your producer. The call sheet covers tomorrow and it lives with everyone. So if your schedule says day three is scenes 14, 15 and 16 at Riverside Walk, the call sheet is what turns that into six call times, a postcode, a parking instruction, a lunch break, a sunset time and five phone numbers.

Most productions send it out in the evening for the next day, usually around six, and usually once the AD is confident nothing else is going to move. On a fast turnaround you’ll end up sending it later than that and your crew will let you know how they feel about it. Getting it out early is one of the cheapest ways to be liked on a set.

On a bigger show the 2nd AD builds it and the 1st AD signs it off before it goes anywhere. On a short you’re probably doing all of that yourself at eleven at night with a cup of tea going cold next to you. Either way the job is the same. You’re taking everything the production knows about tomorrow and boiling it down to the version a tired person can read in thirty seconds.

Free downloadable call sheet template

Word and PDF, no email needed

Here is the template, so you can have it open while we go through this. It is free, there is no email gate and there is no account to make.

• The Word version is a two page .docx you can type straight into and keep on your production drive. There’s a PDF too if you just want to print it. Page one is what your unit reads at call. Page two is the stuff people need during the day rather than before it.
• The online call sheet generator does the same job as a form. You fill in your day, it pulls the weather and the sunrise and sunset times for your location, and you download a finished PDF.

Same document either way, and it comes down to whether you’d rather have a file you can edit by hand or a form that fills in the boring parts for you.

The header block

Production, project and shoot day

At the top of the sheet, you’ve got your production company, the project title, and a one-line description of the day. That description does a lot of work for such a small field. Write “Location day, riverside” and your crew immediately know they’re outside, they know to bring layers, and they’ve got a rough shape for the day before they’ve read anything else.

Over on the right you’ve got the date and which day of the shoot this is. “Day 3 of 12” is doing two jobs at once. If someone’s joining you partway through, it tells them how far along everyone else is. And for your producer it’s an instant read on whether you’re where you should be.

There’s a slot for your production company logo up there too. That’s not just for looks. When a resident or a council officer or a copper asks one of your runners what they’re doing in the street at seven in the morning, handing over a sheet with a company name and a logo on it settles things a lot faster than “I’m with a film thing”.

Call times, meals and estimated wrap

Why crew call gets the biggest type

The general crew call is the number nearly everyone opens the document to find. Someone’s on a train at half ten at night checking their phone one last time before bed, and they want that number in under a second. So give it the biggest type on the page. Sounds obvious, and it’s still easy to end up with the crew call sitting in eight point inside a table alongside everything else, especially when the sheet got built in a hurry at the end of a long day.

Next to it you’ve got breakfast, lunch and estimated wrap. Meal times are worth more thought than they usually get. Most crew agreements, whether that’s a union agreement in the States or a BECTU or PACT arrangement over here, expect the unit to get a proper break within a set window of the crew call, with financial penalties when you miss it. The exact numbers change depending on what you’re shooting and who with, so go and read the agreement that applies to you rather than taking my word for it.

For the call sheet though it’s simpler than that. Writing lunch down in advance makes it a commitment everyone can see, so the conversation about when you’re breaking happens the night before instead of at two in the afternoon with a half built setup and a hungry crew. Your caterer needs the same number, because they’re cooking to it.

Estimated wrap is the one people plan their actual lives around. Crew book childcare and sort lifts home based on whatever’s in that box. You’re allowed to overrun and you probably will at some point, but be honest with the number rather than optimistic. Be consistently two hours out and people just stop believing the number.

Weather and light

Sunrise and sunset are hard limits

Sunrise and sunset are the two things on your day that will not negotiate with you, and they belong somewhere everyone can see them. You’re shooting an exterior in November and the sun’s gone at 16:12, which is the end of the conversation. No amount of enthusiasm from your director buys you a sixth setup after that.

Putting the times on the sheet means the whole unit’s working off the same clock. Your DP can order the coverage so the wide exterior happens while there’s still something in the sky, and your AD has something to point at when someone asks for one more take at ten past four. Without it, that conversation happens around half three with two shots still on the list, and by then you’re either cutting something or lighting it.

Conditions, temperature and wind go in the same strip. Wind is a sound problem and a rigging problem, so knowing it’s blowing changes what your recordist packs and how your grips think about anything tall. And temperature matters most for the actor stood in a summer costume in February waiting on a lighting change, and whoever’s looking after them.

If you use the generator instead of the Word file this fills itself in from the location and date, which is one less job on an evening that’s already full of them.

Location and key contacts

The address is the easy bit

Every call sheet has an address on it. The good ones also have the thing the address doesn’t tell you, which is where to put a vehicle and where unit base is.

“Queen’s Walk, South Bank, London SE1” gets someone to roughly the right area and then leaves them driving in circles with a van full of lights. “Unit base in the car park off Upper Ground, no crew parking on the Walk itself” gets them to the actual spot, and saves you the three phone calls the first version guarantees. If you’re somewhere with controlled parking or a residents’ scheme, spell that out too, including whether you’ve got permits and where people pick one up. Parking fines have a habit of becoming a producer’s problem by Friday.

For contacts, the test I use is simple. Who would someone ring at six in the morning when something’s gone wrong? That’s your AD, your producer, and the production office if you’ve got one. Put your first aider on there by name as well, because “who’s the first aider today” is not a question you want being asked during an actual incident.

Then put your nearest A&E on the sheet with the full address. On nearly every shoot you’ll never touch that line. On the one day you do, everyone standing there is dealing with something frightening, and you don’t want someone trying to search for a hospital on a phone with no signal while someone else is hurt. Putting it on there takes thirty seconds.

The schedule

Times, scenes and page counts in eighths

Your schedule block carries the shape of the day. What time each thing happens, a plain description, the scene numbers, whether it’s day or night, and the page count.

Page counts are worth getting your head around because they’re the closest thing you’ve got to an honest measure of whether a day is doable. The convention is to split every script page into eight parts, measured by how much physical space a scene takes up rather than how big it feels when you read it. Scene takes up half a page, that’s four eighths. Short exchange that’s an inch of the page, one eighth. Add up the eighths for a day and you’ve got a number you can compare against every other day on the schedule.

The reason this system exists rather than just counting scenes is that scenes vary wildly in size. Three scenes could be half a day or ten minutes. Eighths give you a unit that means the same thing everywhere in the script, so you can look at Tuesday and Thursday and compare them.

So a seven and a half page day and a two and a half page day are different animals even if both have nine setups on them. ADs who’ve been doing this a while will tell you what a crew can get through in a day and they’ll say it in pages, never in setups or hours. The number itself depends enormously on what you’re making. A dialogue heavy indie might happily do four or five pages a day. On a commercial you can spend the whole day on half a page. Big budget features often sit lower than people expect, because coverage and setups eat the clock.

If you’re new to scheduling, here’s the most useful habit you can build. Track your actual pages against your planned pages every day for the first week. By day five you’ll know your own crew’s real rate, and every schedule you build after that gets more honest. You’ll learn more from that one column of numbers than from anything you read about scheduling, including this.

Keep the descriptions in plain English. “Chase sequence along the Walk” beats a formal scene heading in capitals when someone’s reading it in the dark at six in the morning. The scene numbers are there for anyone cross referencing the script, and everyone else just reads the sentence.

Cast, and the column most templates get wrong

An actor has three call times, not one

Plenty of call sheet templates give the cast section a single column headed “call time”. That works right up until the first morning where somebody needs to be in the make-up chair two hours before your AD wants them on set, which on most shoots is the first morning.

An actor’s morning has three moments in it that all matter, and they can sit hours apart. There’s the pickup, which is when a driver collects them or when they need to leave the house. There’s the make-up and wardrobe call, when they sit down in the chair and hand themselves over to HMU. And there’s on set, which is when your AD wants them standing in the right place ready to go. Contemporary shoot, those might be forty minutes apart. Period drama or anything with prosthetics and you’re easily looking at three hours between the make-up call and on set.

So when a sheet only carries one of those numbers, one of two things happens. Either your actor turns up at the on set time with nothing done to them and the whole unit stands around while make-up rushes a job they should have had an hour for. Or they turn up at the pickup time and sit in a trailer for ninety minutes wondering whether anyone remembered they were coming. Neither is a disaster on its own. Both of them chip away at how much your cast trusts the production, and that’s harder to get back than an hour.

Three columns instead of one and it mostly stops happening. HMU should be the ones telling you what those gaps need to be, rather than you guessing. Ask your designer how long each look takes and build the times backwards from when you need them on set.

One more thing on this section. If you’re carrying background artists, give them their own line or their own block rather than mixing them in with your principals. They usually have a different call, a different holding area and a different person looking after them, and putting fifteen extras in among six named cast makes the whole table harder to read for everybody.

Why cast numbers matter

You will also spot a narrow numbered column down the left of the cast table. Numbering your cast runs through all your production paperwork and it’s worth doing even on something small.

Every speaking role gets a number, roughly in order of size, and that number follows the character everywhere. It sits next to scenes in your breakdown, it identifies the actor on your day out of days, and it turns a long name into one character on a stripboard. Once you’re on a shoot with twenty cast and a schedule that keeps shifting, writing “3, 7, 11” against a scene instead of three full names is the difference between something you can read at a glance and something you have to sit and decode.

Crew

Group by department, not alphabetically

Your crew section has department, name, role and call time, and the order you put them in matters more than you’d think. Grouping by department is just how a crew experiences a day. Camera turns up and works as a unit. Art department is often in an hour or more before anyone else because a set needs finishing before the first shot. Grips and sparks might beat both of them there, because someone has to get the lights off the truck.

Group it that way and a runner scanning the sheet at half five in the morning finds their own line without reading forty names looking for themselves. It also makes staggered calls obvious. Camera at seven and art department at half five is visible instantly instead of buried in a list.

And put those staggered calls on the sheet rather than firing them out separately. Anything that travels by WhatsApp instead of appearing on the call sheet is something someone won’t have when they need it.

Notes

The box that saves your first hour

The notes box holds everything your crew needs before they arrive that doesn’t fit in a column. It’s the section people skip when they’re in a hurry and it’s usually the most useful part of the whole sheet.

Weather cover if the forecast turns, noise restrictions from your location agreement, and anything practical about the space itself. “Quiet residential street, keep noise down before 08:00” is the line that stops a complaint that loses you the location. So is telling people there’s nowhere to get changed, or that the toilets are a five minute walk, or that there’s no signal in the basement where you’re shooting the back half of the day.

None of it’s exciting. All of it is stuff that otherwise gets asked forty times before nine, usually to the person with the least time to answer.

Getting it out to people

Who gets it, and how you send it

Worth a quick word on distribution, because a perfect call sheet that half your unit never opened is just a document.

Send it as a PDF rather than the editable file. It stops the layout falling apart on someone’s phone and it stops anyone accidentally sending a version they’ve typed over. One email, everyone on it, cast and crew together unless you’ve got a reason to split them. Put the production, the date and the day number in the subject line so it’s findable when someone’s scrolling back through their inbox on the train.

Then ping the group chat to say it’s out. People don’t check email at ten at night, they check WhatsApp. That one message is the difference between a sheet that’s been read and a sheet that’s been delivered.

And print a few copies for the day itself. Phones die, signal disappears, and someone always wants to scribble on something. A handful of paper copies at unit base costs you nothing and gets used every single time.

Page two and what belongs on it

Reference material for during the day

Page one answers “where do I need to be and when”. Page two answers the questions that come up once everyone’s already there. Keeping those separate is worth more than squeezing everything onto one sheet, because the moment page one gets crowded people stop reading it properly.

Tomorrow’s schedule. Giving your crew the next day’s call and location the night before costs you nothing and people appreciate it. They’re booking childcare and sorting travel around it. On a shoot where the advance is reliable, everyone organises their life with a lot less friction, and you can feel that on set.

Department notes. Twelve blocks, one per department, for the stuff that only concerns camera or only concerns costume. A note about a lens turning up late doesn’t need reading by catering. Splitting them out keeps page one clean and gives your HODs somewhere obvious to look.

Walkie channels. One is usually production, two is usually camera, and after that it’s whatever your show does. Writing it down means that conversation happens once, in advance, instead of eleven times before lunch.

Safety and emergency. Emergency number, nearest A&E, first aider by name, and a reference to your risk assessment. Any shoot with a permit, an insurance policy or a location agreement behind it, someone’s eventually going to want proof this got circulated. Having it on the call sheet means that proof just exists rather than being something you cobble together after the fact.

Four ways to get it wrong

Sending it too late

A call sheet landing at eleven at night hasn’t been read by a good chunk of your crew, because they were asleep, and the ones who were awake weren’t taking in a change to their call time. If the schedule isn’t locked until late, send what you’ve got with a clear note saying an update’s coming, which beats sending nothing.

Letting two versions float about

When you do send an update, make it obvious. Say so in the subject line and change something visible on the document itself so two sheets sitting next to each other on a phone are instantly different. Units have turned up at yesterday’s location because a revised sheet looked identical to the one before it.

Putting everything on it

Your call sheet gets read standing up, outside, often in the dark, usually on a phone. Every bit of information you add that nobody needs before or during the day makes the bits that do matter harder to find. Contracts, full contact lists and kit inventories all belong somewhere in your production folder, away from the sheet the unit reads at call.

Leaving the hospital line blank

Quickest field on the sheet to fill in and the only one you can’t improvise when it matters. Do it every day, including the days you’re somewhere familiar and it feels like overkill.

When a template stops being enough

A Word template is great for a short, a music video, a commercial, or anything where you’re making one or two call sheets and then you’re done, because you open it, fill it in and send it.

Where it starts to creak is around day nine of a schedule that keeps moving. By then you’re copying the same cast list into a fresh document for the ninth time, updating call times by hand across three tables, and hoping the version in front of you reflects the reschedule that happened at wrap. That’s exactly where the mistakes come from, and they’re the expensive kind. An actor who never got told their call moved is a quiet disaster until about seven the next morning.

That’s the problem we built InteScene to fix. Your schedule, cast and crew all live in one place and the call sheet gets generated from the day you’re shooting instead of retyped from the last one. Move a scene to another day and the sheet moves with it, along with your day out of days and everything else hanging off it.

But if what you need today is a call sheet for Tuesday, grab the template at the top. It’ll get you through the day, and it’s what most of us started on.

Up next

How to build a shooting schedule

Your call sheet is only ever as good as the schedule underneath it. If the day it’s describing was never achievable in the first place, no amount of tidy formatting is going to rescue it. Next time we’re looking at how a shooting schedule comes together, from breaking the script down into scenes through to building a stripboard that survives contact with a real shooting day.

Free shooting schedule and stripboard generator

And if you’ve got something on your call sheets that’s saved you on a shoot day, stick it in the comments, because I’m always after new ideas.