Call sheets and crew confirmations for video producers

The idea

A crew member who misreads a call time can blow a shoot day that costs thousands in location fees, talent, and rescheduled clients, which is why call sheets exist. Yet at 2-to-10-person production companies they are rebuilt in Google Docs for every shoot, sent as attachments into the void, and the producer spends the night before texting ‘did you see the call sheet’. StudioBinder solves it inside a 99-plus suite most small shops neither want nor fully use.

The wedge is the confirmation loop: per-recipient confirm links and a red/amber/green board that turns ‘did everyone see it’ into a glance. Auto-pulled weather and sunrise/sunset, which producers currently look up by hand for every exterior day, is the detail that makes the sheet feel professionally produced.

Who pays

The producer or owner of a small production company pays 29 dollars a month, unlimited shoots, against StudioBinder’s suite pricing. They are easy to find: filmmaking and video-business Facebook groups, r/videography, and freelance crew networks where the call sheet itself circulates with the product’s footer on it, making every shoot a referral. Wedding and corporate video shops shoot weekly, so usage is habitual, which protects retention.

MVP scope

• Shoot builder: locations, schedule blocks, crew from a contacts directory
• Single-page call sheet PDF with auto-pulled weather and sunrise/sunset
• Individual emails with tokenised confirm links, no crew logins
• Confirmation board with one-click chasing
• Versioned revisions that re-confirm only affected crew
• Skip for v1: shot lists and storyboards, budgets, availability scheduling, SMS delivery, multi-day episodic tooling

Build CallTime, a call sheet generator for small video production companies. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (auth and Postgres), Resend for email, Open-Meteo for weather and sunrise/sunset (no API key needed).

Core flow: a producer creates a shoot with: project and client name, date, one or more locations (address, parking notes, nearest hospital, on-site contact), a schedule as time blocks (crew call, first setup, lunch, wrap), and a crew list pulled from a reusable contacts directory (name, role, email, phone, individual call time if it differs from general call). Generating the call sheet renders a properly formatted single-page PDF in the layout crews expect: production banner, date and day-of-days, general call time large at the top, weather and sunrise/sunset auto-pulled for the location and date from Open-Meteo, location block with map link, schedule table, and the crew grid with per-person call times.

Sending emails every crew member individually via Resend with the PDF attached and a personal confirm button hitting /confirm/[token], no login. The shoot page shows a confirmation board: confirmed green, viewed amber, untouched red, with one-click chase emails to stragglers. Any edit after sending offers 'send revision', which bumps the sheet's version, marks it REVISED in the banner, and resets confirmations only for people whose call time changed.

Pages: /shoots (upcoming list), /shoots/[id] (builder plus confirmation board), /contacts, /settings (company branding). Magic-link auth.

Pricing: 29 dollars/month, unlimited shoots and crew. 14-day trial.