Call sheet example: a filled-in sheet for a one-day shoot, section by section

A call sheet is the thing everyone on a shoot should have read the night before. It tells each person where to be, when, and who to ask for when they get there. When it’s missing something, the crew tends to find out all at once, at seven in the morning, at the wrong entrance.

So here’s a filled-in one. It’s a made-up shoot, a founder film for a small manufacturer, but it’s laid out the way we lay out our own. We’re a video production company, and this is roughly what goes to our crew and our client the evening before a day like this.

If you’d like to follow along, our free call sheet template loads this same example with one click, and you can type over it with your own day.

What is a call sheet?

It’s a one or two page plan for a single shoot day, sent to everyone involved: the crew, the people on camera, the client, and anyone dropping off gear. It answers the questions people would otherwise text you about. Where am I going. What time do I need to be there. What happens, in what order. Who else is coming. What do we do if something goes wrong.

It isn’t a script and it isn’t a shot list. The script is what gets said. The shot list is what gets filmed. The call sheet is how the day runs, so the other two can actually happen.

The example, top to bottom

Whose shoot it is

Page one opens with the production and the client.

Founder film · Client: Halden Tools · Day 1 of 2

That’s all it needs, so whoever opens it knows right away they’ve got the right one, even a freelancer it was forwarded to who’s never heard of you.

The five times people actually look for

Unit call is when the crew arrives. First shot is when the camera rolls on the first setup. The hour in between is unloading and getting the lights and sound ready. We write both down, because otherwise the client turns up at 7:45, sees nobody filming, and starts wondering what they’re paying for.

The weather

It looks like decoration on an indoor shoot. It usually isn’t. In our example there’s one outdoor shot, the building with its sign, and the forecast says light rain. That’s the kind of thing that decides whether the exterior goes first or last.

The template fetches the forecast for the location and the date, then keeps it with the sheet, so the forecast stays on the sheet if you’ve opened the page once with a signal and then lose it.

The location, and how to actually get in

Canal Works, Unit 4
Parking and access: yard behind the unit, sign in at the office, hi-vis past the roller door.

The access line is the one that matters. “Sign in at the office” and “hi-vis past the roller door” decide whether your crew spends its first ten minutes setting up or looking for someone with a key. If the entrance is hard to find, put coordinates or a what3words reference for the door itself, not just the building.

Emergency details

The nearest emergency room, the nearest pharmacy, who to call on the day and on what number, and who’s handling first aid.

This one has to be right, so look it up for this location every single time. Don’t copy it from the last sheet. A blank template leaves these fields empty on purpose and says so on the sheet, because a made-up hospital address is worse than a blank one; the example fills them in so you can see the shape.

The schedule

This is the part people spend the most time on, and rightly. Each row is a block of time: what happens, where, and who’s needed.

The wrap row starts at 16:30 so everything’s packed away by the 17:00 finish. On the printed sheet each row also carries the shots it covers and what the crew needs for it, a slider or a tripod or a lav and a boom, so the schedule and the shot list agree.

A few things worth copying from it.

The interview goes first. The person who matters most, and whose schedule is least flexible, gets filmed while everyone’s fresh and before anything has had a chance to run late.

Moving rooms gets its own line. If your schedule jumps straight from one room to the next, it’s pretending the move takes no time, and your day is longer than it looks.

Sarah gets released at lunch. That tells her she can take her calls, and it tells the crew not to go hunting for her.

Who’s on camera, and when

Everyone gets their own call time. Sarah’s needed at 08:15, not 07:30. Call her in with the crew and she spends an hour in a corridor watching people carry light stands, which is a good way to lose someone’s goodwill before you’ve filmed anything.

Crew, client and suppliers

Crew get names, cell numbers and call times, and any pick-ups go on the sheet rather than in a text thread, so there’s one place to change them if plans move. The client contact gets their own call time and a note of where they’ll be, which in our example is the meeting room, half an hour into the interview. Good to know, so nobody opens that door mid-take. Suppliers get a drop time and a collection time, because somebody has to be there to sign for the gear.

Catering and notes

Hot lunch at 12:30 in the office. Two vegetarian, one gluten free.
Safety glasses for everyone on the workshop floor.
No customer names readable on screens or paperwork.
No personal photos of the floor on social.
Sarah has a hard stop at 17:00.

This is where the rules of the place go: safety gear, what can’t be filmed or posted, and anyone who has to leave on time. Our template prints any line that starts with “No” in red, which helps it get noticed.

Mistakes that cost you the morning

One call time for everyone. The people on camera rarely need to arrive with the crew.

An address and nothing else. People need to know which door.

Copying the emergency section from the last job. Look it up again.

No time for moves. Packing up and setting up in another room takes longer than anyone thinks.

Sending it late. Send it the evening before and ask everyone to reply that they’ve got it. Most call sheet problems turn up the next morning, when it’s too late to fix them.

Doing it from a template

You can build a call sheet in Google Docs or Word, and plenty of people do. You’re editing a document rather than filling in a form, which works until you’ve reformatted the same table for the tenth time.

Dedicated production software goes further, and on a bigger shoot it’s worth it. On its paid plans, StudioBinder sends the sheet by text and email and shows you who’s viewed and confirmed it. You need an account to make one. SetHero lets you start a call sheet without signing up, and its paid plans send it out and track who has received, opened and confirmed it.

Ours is for the smaller shoot. You fill in the free call sheet template on the page and print it, on A4 or Letter, with your own name or logo on it. There’s no account and nothing to sign up for, and what you type stays in your browser. It doesn’t send the sheet or keep track of who’s read it, so you send the PDF yourself. The printed sheet has a small “Made with Miracue” line at the bottom.

We’re also building a way to save you typing it all out: drop the client’s brief and the email thread into Claude or ChatGPT and have it fill in the call sheet, leaving blank anything it can’t find. Whatever you give it goes to the AI company you use. It isn’t live yet, and there’s more about it at the end of our pre-production checklist.

We built it for the corporate and marketing shoots we do ourselves, so it’ll suit you if that’s your work too, whether you run a small production company on your own or you’re the person in marketing who ends up organizing the filming. If you’re writing the shot list for the same day, the shot list template is the other half of it, and everything we give away is on one page.

When you want it on everyone’s phone

The template prints a good sheet. Miracue Pro, which opens in November, takes it further. Your call sheet and shot list live on one shoot, your crew opens the whole day on their phones from one link, and your client gets their own link to the plan. Change a call time, and it changes on every phone. Pro also comes with AI storyboard sketches and an AI assistant that fills in the call sheet from the client’s notes. Studio, for teams, follows in January.

Join the Pro waitlist to hear first. The template stays free either way.

Questions