Scheduling for my role as Production Manager

Out of all the work a Production Manager has to do, I found that scheduling was the trickiest.

This was because everyone has different working hours and are not able to meet the same deadlines. Never the less, I took initiative and did what I had to do regarding the scheduling.

 First, after talking with the producer and when he wanted the VTs ready a deadline was set for the pre-production to be ready. This deadline was pushed twice because of the department having bad luck finding actors.

After that, I sat down with the producer, director and assistant producer and we worked backwards from the already existing deadlines. This creating the schedule below, which can also be seen in the google drive account :



After doing this, I decided to make it more simple for everyone else to follow and make it clear when each department had a deadline.

There was one point, where some of the team was not happy about their deadlines and although I was in Cyprus at the time I still managed to fix the 2 dates which they were not happy with. Afterwards I had to remind them, that I have set the deadline along with the producer and it is now their responsibility to meet the deadlines which have been timetabled in our schedules.

Below is the sheet in which was modified after the change of deadlines:

The VT wanted to film the trivia VT in the studio when it looked like it was being used, therefore it was best to use it during one of our rehearsals in the studio which meant that that VT would not be ready for viewing on the 20th but would be pushed for the 31st March instead. Unfortunately by doing this, it does not leave enough time if any changes are needed because all VTs must be submitted by the 3rd April. This permission was given by Helen.  

A few changes were later made to the schedule because of the VTs - after the 20th March. This was because the VTs had to be re-filmed. It was tricky trying to schedule that in because a lot of students had started their commission work. The day that VT producer decided to film on was the 29th March. Only reason this is not the ideal date is because we have a rehearsal on the 28th March so it would have been nice to use the VTs but most importantly it does not leave the editors a lot of time to edit until their fine cut viewing which is on the 31st March, which has been timetabled by Simon and Helen. But this was the best date, because of everyone being busy.