The producer’s one-pager
The Plan is the moment the direction stops belonging to you alone. It assembles everything a studio needs to shoot the campaign into one producer’s document: call sheet, shot list, lighting, equipment, location, casting, budget and timeline. On a spatial brief the casting spec becomes a material and FF&E spec — the discipline changes, the document does not.
Read it as a handover, because that is what it is. The chapters above it argue for the work; the Plan assumes the argument is won and gets on with logistics. Generate it once the direction has settled, and regenerate whenever the brief moves — it rebuilds from the current state of the project, not from memory.
What the package contains
The call sheet opens the document: title, schedule, location, and crew calls with times against each role. The shot list follows, numbered, each shot carrying a title, a working description and tags for lens, angle and complexity — enough for a first assistant director to build a running order without ringing you.
Lighting arrives twice: as a drawn schematic with the subject at the centre and each light placed around it, and as a table of positions and notes underneath. Equipment is a tagged list for the rental house. The location brief and casting spec are written as prose a scout or a casting director can act on directly.
The budget closes the practical case: a figure in pounds that is the sum of the line items beneath it (a range only where the lines carry one), and the timeline breaks the day into blocks, each with its activity. Between them they answer the two questions every producer asks first: what does it cost, and how long does it take.
Tiers and the printed page
Like the Proof, the Plan can arrive in three tiers — Lean, Considered, Flagship — and the same rule holds: one plan, scaled to budget, never three separate ideas. The toggle sits at the top of the document; the tier you are viewing is the tier that prints.
Export / Print renders the package as a document you can put on a table. Use it. A production plan that lives only on a screen gets skimmed; the same plan printed gets annotated, argued with and signed off. The action bar hides itself on print, so what comes out of the printer is the document and nothing else.
The Cut: the Editor’s Eye
The Cut is the Plan’s counterweight. Where the package prepares the work, the Cut judges it. You choose frames — previz or your own uploads — and put them under the Eye, which grades each one against the brief. It evaluates; it never generates.
Each frame comes back with a score, a verdict, its strengths, its drift — the specific ways it has wandered from the direction — and a fix. The strongest frames are marked as hero selects, and an overall read closes the critique. The score colours tell you at a glance where the set stands: a frame in crimson has failed the brief, not merely underperformed.
The discipline to learn here is reading drift before reading score. A high-scoring frame with named drift is a warning about your next generation; a modest frame with none may be closer to the direction than it looks.
Who gets what
Leave this chapter knowing the routing. The production package goes to your producer, whole — call sheet, shots, lighting, budget, timeline — printed or as the exported document. The shot list and lighting section alone serve the first AD and the gaffer. The location brief goes to the scout; the casting spec to casting.
The Cut stays closer to home. Its verdicts and fixes are direction for you and whoever runs your next generation pass; the hero selects are what you forward to the client, because they are the frames the brief itself would have chosen. The Plan is what you hand over; the Cut is how you decide what deserves handing over.