Scheduling

Hold day

What is hold day in film production?

A hold day is a day on which a performer is contractually retained and paid but not called to set. It sits between their first and last working day, keeping them exclusive to the production and unavailable to take other work.

Hold days are the direct cost of shooting out of order. They are not waste — the alternative is losing the performer — but a schedule that generates long runs of them is usually one that grouped by location when it should have grouped by cast.

Crew can be held too — pencilled for a day without being called — and what that pays differs far more than it does for performers. On many Indian productions a daily-wage technician's hold day is unpaid or part-paid; elsewhere a hold is a full day. It is the production's rule, and worth writing down before the schedule starts moving.

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Planning who each shoot day needs

Reviewed 2026-10-09

Related terms

Day Out of Days: A Day Out of Days is a grid showing which cast and crew are required on which shooting days. Each row is a person, each column a day, and each cell is marked with a status code — start work, work, hold, drop, or finish. It is the document contracts and payroll are built from.
Drop and pickup: Drop and pickup is a scheduling provision that lets a production stop paying a performer during a gap between their working days, then re-engage them later. The performer is dropped after one day and picked up on a later one, with the intervening hold days not paid.
Bata: Bata is the daily allowance paid on Indian film sets on top of a wage, originally for food and travel. Night bata is the extra allowance paid for working a night shoot. It is usually a fixed amount per person per day rather than a share of pay, and is budgeted separately from wages.
Call slip: A call slip is the record of one person's work on one production on one day: how much of a call they worked, any overtime, and what that day pays them. Daily-wage crew are paid by adding up their call slips, so the slip — not the week — is the unit of money.