All hands on deck. If you have more than one large vehicle (van, truck) send out the “production minions” to your three main places first. If there is only one vehicle we recommend the following schedule. Plan on this taking at least 14 hours and you won’t be disappointed.

Get your grip and lighting as early in the morning as you can. Get to the production space and load in. Organize and label everything that comes off the truck. You might have to shout at someone to get a 5K – but without labels some of the grips won’t know what they’re looking for. It’s worth the extra hour of organization to have labels on everything. Have the gaffer and DP there to set the lights, gels, tape the electricals, swab the decks and whack a mole. Tell the carpenters to hold the ladders and brace themselves for the next wave of things.

Go to your art director’s house, or the garage where your art director has stored all of the items for the set. Get back to the location and have the grips unload and set your carpenters on any finishing projects. We had hinges that had to be set into place on the coffee bar and a door that couldn’t be hung until all of our furniture was in. That’s the kind of project that should be done, not major building.

Pick up the dolly and all of the camera extras. Mount the camera and do a test shoot the night before with at least three different looks. This is the tape that can really help a director. He or she has always thought about how it would look and now is the time to modify the image to adapt to how things are. It’s usually very gratifying to make this space look better overnight.

Have your UPM sleep in the space overnight. OK that was just our UPM. Take the portable valuables out of the space (read camera) and have a nightly breakdown chart. Who takes the camera? Who loads the sound onto the computer? Who puts the batteries back in the charger? Who pays for the beer at the end of the first day? There’s no wrong answer for any of these questions, just make sure you know the flow so that every night it isn’t some kind of chaotic modern dance where something might be missed. We opted to buy six extra batteries for the camera and an extra charger. This was thought of as an extravagance, but it was actually fit our needs almost perfectly. By the end of every day we were calling for the batteries which just finished the charge cycle. We switched the batteries 10 times a day minimum. Modern cameras are just sick for power. They remind me of our Executive producer, but that’s another story ;)

You can bring the food to the location on the load day or on the first day of shooting. Just make sure that you add three hours to your call time if you’re going to shop for and bring things to set. Don’t leave people without their Jerky or Vitamin water. A set without food is a sad, sad thing. It’s like a rock concert without drugs. Use the RV to store the food if there’s no space for a kitchen on location, but if you’re lucky enough to have the room, set it up early as a food and social room. This does two things, it keeps the food off of the set, and it’s awkward to socialize in a messy area. People tend to keep the place cleaner if they have to sit and look at it while talking. Our kitchen area swung between health code violation and pleasant. Pleasant was usually the product of someone sitting around chatting and then deciding to clean rather than abandon a conversation with one of the many very attractive actors or crew members we had. I’m not kidding, I’ve never met a more attractive crew. The women in the make up room broke many hearts and minds while they prettied up the cast with their skills and the general surroundings with their presence.

Don’t let food be the issue of anyone on the creative staff. Anyone can clean even the producer. And anyone can grab a cup of coffee for anyone else (the director used to coffee up one of the actors when he flagged), but don’t let any of the concerns of food come to the feet of the people on the set. Designate the lunch schedule and menu to your most popular grip. Nobody gets mad at a grip for a late lunch or a bad choice of food one day. Prepare for some problems with the food. It’s going to be bad. If you wanted to start a chef school this would be a real problem. Shooting a movie, it’s just part of the territory. Put barbed wire around this new land and relegate it to a kind of social DMZ. Have the grip informally poll the people for things they’d like to see on the shelves and occasionally spring for specialty items to let them know you listen and will provide them with comfort food when the budget and time allows.