Company Moves: The Most Expensive Thing on Your Schedule

What a company move is

A company move is relocating the entire unit — cast, crew, equipment, trucks, catering — from one location to another during a shoot day.

It is, hour for hour, usually the most expensive thing that happens on a film set, because it produces nothing. No pages get shot while a unit is in transit.

What it actually costs

The travel time is the smallest part. A move involves:

• Wrapping the current location — striking lighting and grip, packing camera, clearing the space
• Loading trucks
• Travelling — the only part anyone counts
• Unloading at the new location
• Rigging — lighting and grip build again from nothing
• Resetting cast through makeup and wardrobe if needed

A "twenty-minute move" is routinely two to three hours door to door. On a ten-hour day, that's a quarter of your shooting time gone.

Two moves in a day and you have, in practice, a half day.

Why they happen anyway

Sometimes they're unavoidable. A scene needs a specific location and there's no way to group it with anything nearby.

More often they happen because the schedule was built around something other than location — actor availability, or shooting roughly in script order, or a location only being available on a specific date.

Those are real constraints. The mistake isn't accepting a move; it's accepting one without knowing what it cost.

Scheduling to avoid them

Group by location first. Before considering anything else, cluster every scene at each location. This is the single highest-value scheduling decision and it should be the first pass, not a refinement.

Shoot out a location. Finish everywhere completely before leaving. Returning to a location later is a second move plus a re-rig, and creates continuity exposure.

Accept cast hold days to avoid moves. This trade comes up constantly. A held cast member costs a day rate; a company move costs a quarter of a shooting day across the entire unit. The move is usually more expensive — but check the actual numbers, because a high-cost performer can flip it.

Look for locations that double. Two rooms in one building might play as two locations. A location scout who understands scheduling is worth a great deal.

Put unavoidable moves at natural breaks. Moving over lunch costs less than moving mid-afternoon, because some of the time is already lost.

Reading the trade-off

The reason scheduling is hard is that the constraints fight each other:

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There's no schedule that wins all four. There's only the one where you understood what you traded.

This is why building two schedules and comparing them is worth the time. Most tools model a single mutable schedule, so testing an alternative means destroying the current one. Cloning a stripboard into a scenario lets you compare shoot days, moves and hold days side by side and pick with evidence rather than instinct.

Banners on the board

On a stripboard, a company move is marked with a banner between strips — a non-scene marker that occupies space on the board.

That's not decoration. It's there so the move is visible as something taking time, rather than an invisible assumption between two scenes. A board with three banners in a week looks wrong at a glance, which is the point.

On the day

If a move is happening, the call sheet needs:

• The move time and the destination address
• Parking and unit base at the new location
• Nearest hospital for the new location, not the old one
• Which departments travel when — art often goes ahead to pre-rig

Pre-rigging with a split unit is the main way to reduce move cost, if you can afford the second crew.

The short version

Count your moves. Each one costs roughly a quarter of a shooting day. Before accepting one, work out what removing it would cost in hold days or continuity — and take that trade more often than feels comfortable.