Charlie Chaplin: Field Operations Genius

Call sheets have organized on-set production for 8+ decades, time to upgrade

There’s often drama in situations for which There.App is built like touring political campaigns, or mobilizing disaster recovery or, literally dramatically: on-set camera shoots. These can be intense exercises with exacting timelines, on-the-fly team formation, and quality of execution driving major upside, or downside, results.

A few of us come to There.App with experience in media production and the related technologies. Sometimes cast and crew gather on set without any of them knowing each other, and costs immediately start piling up for space occupied, equipment used and people’s time. If the planned shots incorporate considerations about daylight, that’s finite and constantly changing.

It’s vital to get everyone immediately on the same page, and in this industry that page has a name: “call sheet”. The earliest version that I’ve come across is from Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 production of The Great Dictator movie. Call sheet evolution has been modest during the near-century since then. The top-center, in unavoidably large font, presents a “call time” of when and where most people should show up for the day, and below that are several tables of logistical details like who’s involved and how to contact them, and the upcoming shoot schedule. It’s common to put the address of the closest urgent care center, with a can’t-miss red cross icon, in a call sheet’s lower-right corner for quick action in case of an accident.

I’ve been involved in a few productions organized on call sheets. They work. But they’re imperfect, and increasingly anachronistic. Of course they’re rarely distributed on physical sheets any more, it’s usually a pdf file, but where can it be found? Was it emailed, or IM’ed, or put onto cloud storage, or uploaded to some other online software in use for the project? And once the file’s found, what’s to assure it’s up to date? And taking actions based on call sheet data is clunky, requiring mental filing of the relevant info, switching to whatever app relates to the activity (phone, or calendar, or IM etc.) and then executing on it there, possibly waylaid by distractions encountered.

Given our team’s familiarity, There.App does indeed take serious inspiration from call sheets, including how we prioritize consistent structure of diverse information whether it’s when to arrive, how to spell the director’s name, or where to get medical attention for some on-set mishap. But it’s time to bring these considerations into the 21st century, organized in an app, with reliably live information that’s one-tap actionable in fluid presentation guiding users to the details that matter in the moment. Benefits of such modernization extend beyond media production, to all sorts of situations of on-site project execution by teams. Member personas may range from Great Dictator to Little Tramp (more Charlie Chaplin references, we’re all about the 21st century, usually) – everyone can now be more in sync, productive and focused than ever before.