How to Build a Call Sheet for a Multi-Location Shoot Day

The Multi-Location Day Problem

A single-location shoot day is a relay: one call time, one parking plan, one hospital, one sunset. A multi-location day is more like an air-traffic-control shift. You have two or three location blocks, a company move in the middle, staggered call times for departments, and a sun that keeps setting whether your shot list cooperates or not. The call sheet is the only document that keeps all of that coordinated, and a generic one-page template built for a studio day will not survive contact with a three-location commercial or an indie shoot bouncing between a house and a downtown rooftop.

Here is how a veteran 1st AD builds a call sheet for a multi-location shoot day, section by section, so the day actually flows the way you scheduled it.

Start With the Move, Not the Locations

The most common mistake on multi-location call sheets is listing locations like a menu: Location A, Location B, Location C, with the schedule sandwiched somewhere in between. Crew do not experience the day as locations. They experience it as movement. The schedule is the spine, and everything else hangs off it.

Build the day in blocks with travel time treated as a scheduled item, not a gap. The timeline should read: Wrap Location A at 14:00, Company Move 14:00 to 15:00, Set at Location B, Lunch at Location B 15:30. If the move is not an item on the schedule, it is invisible, and invisible items are the ones everyone is late for. Give the move a named leader in the call sheet notes (usually the locations manager or the UPM), with their direct phone number, so there is one voice routing traffic instead of forty drivers guessing.

A rule of thumb: pad every company move with 50 percent more time than your maps app promises. A 20-minute drive between locations becomes a 30-minute scheduled move. You are not moving one car, you are moving a caravan of equipment trucks, talent, and people who will need bathrooms the moment they arrive.

Stagger Call Times and Say Exactly Who Goes Where

On a single-location day, one general call time works. On a multi-location day, it is a recipe for a full crew standing around the first location watching one department work. Stagger the calls: skeleton crew (camera, grip, electric, locations) calls at the first location for setup, the full crew calls 60 to 90 minutes later, and cast calls per scene, with each call time printed next to the name on the call sheet.

The department that owns each location must have its own contact block on the sheet. The first location gets the nearest hospital and parking instructions. The second location gets the same treatment. Never assume anyone has seen a location that was scouted last week; print the parking and basecamp instructions for every location on every sheet, not just the first one. Your day-player PA who arrives at location B at 2:00 PM should not have to call you for directions while you are running a set.

Repeat the Critical Fields at Every Location

Hospital, parking, restrooms, producer phone, and set contact: these five fields belong under every location header, not just once at the top. When someone opens the call sheet on their phone mid-day, they should land on the info they need without scrolling to page one. Digital call sheets with collapsible sections handle this well; on a PDF, repeat the block on each location's page.

This is also where the nearest-hospital discipline matters most. A downtown location and a rural location have very different emergency plans, and the sheet needs both. If you have a medic or set safety officer, their name and phone live at the top of every location block. Safety paperwork is only useful if it is where people look.

Flag the Handoff Moments in Advance Schedule Notes

The end of the call sheet, the advance schedule or day-ahead notes, is where you document what changes tomorrow. On a multi-location day, the advance schedule has one job beyond the usual scene list: tell everyone which location they start at tomorrow. A crew member who wrapped at a rooftop today may call at a warehouse tomorrow, and the advance note must say so plainly, with an address and a map pin.

Also confirm the obvious: parking passes, permits, and load-in times for the next location. The permits for location B were pulled weeks ago, but if the permitted window opens at 10:00 and your schedule has crew arriving at 9:00, that conflict needs to be visible on the sheet, not discovered in a panic at the curb.

Distribution: One Revision, One Version, Zero Confusion

Multi-location days change more often. Weather shifts, a permit slides, a location falls through at 10:00 PM. Every revision gets a version stamp (v2, v3) with a time, and the new version replaces the old one in the distribution channel. Never send delta texts like 'location B moved to Elm Street' without reissuing the sheet; fragments get lost, but a single current sheet with a visible version number keeps everyone honest.

Use a tool that tracks who confirmed the sheet, so you are not texting thirty people asking if they saw the update. The whole point of digital confirmations is knowing exactly who still owes you a look before the moves start.

Make It Once, Reuse It Forever

The fastest multi-location call sheets are built from templates, not from scratch. Save your two-location and three-location layouts, the move-schedule wording, and the repeated safety blocks, so next time you are building a shoot day, the structure is already there and you are just filling in addresses. That is how you turn the night-before spreadsheet grind into a twenty-minute job. If you want that template to distribute itself with one click and collect confirmations automatically, Easy Call Sheets was built exactly for this: professional call sheets, one-click distribution, and live cast and crew confirmations, so your moves run on time and your phone stays quiet. And if your shoot days run heavy on video, Envy Creative has breakdowns of the production workflows that keep multi-camera days moving.