THE WALLET Production Book

A production book is used to keep track of the many people, things, and events that go into making a movie. Without a production book, it is close to impossible to make everything happen when it is supposed to happen. You may get useable footage, but you'll blow tons of money and time and everyone's patience.

If you do a little research, you'll notice that each production team has their own way of doing things and their own ideas about what documents go into a production book and how they are created or generated. If the members of a production team are used to working with each other, certain types of information may be understood without having it in the production book, but it's better to err on the side of more planning and information.

The documents in our production book include the:

• marked up script
• storyboard
• overheads
• shot list
• setups
• call sheets
• schedule
• budget

A document in a production book contains information that ties it to other documents causing them to be interdependent. So, when you change a bit of information in one, it often means changing other information in others. As difficult as coordinating documents can be sometimes, it is way easier than coordinating the information on set with no references.

The documents linked in the list above are snapshots from different days during preproduction and production. Each document had many versions and many on-the-fly changes so the details in one may not synch up with the others. Like, the schedule was done very early in preproduction and changed every day until we wrapped.

You can see a little of what happened during production.