First Assistant Director

What they do

The first AD converts a script into a shooting schedule and then defends it. In prep they break the script down element by element, build a stripboard, and order the scenes to suit locations, cast availability, daylight, stunts, children and animals, then negotiate the day count with the producer. They generate call sheets, which tell every department and every cast member where to be and when, and issue them the night before. On the day they run the floor: calling the crew to set, running rehearsals for camera, setting background action with the second AD, calling turnover and cut, and moving the company on. They track how the day is going against the schedule in their head continuously and tell the director, early enough to matter, that two setups have to become one. Safety on the floor is theirs, from stunts and firearms briefings to how a crowd is managed and when the crew last ate. They also hold the room: the first AD is the reason a set is quiet during a take and the reason a hundred people know what is happening next. In the United States and Canada the craft is guild-covered and has a formal training route through the DGA Assistant Director Training Program.

What they decide

The calls that belong to this role and no other.

• The shooting schedule and the order of the day's work
• The call sheet: who is called, when, and to where
• The pace of the floor: when to rehearse, when to turn over, when to move on
• Safety briefings and how stunts, weapons, crowds and hazards are managed on the floor
• What gets cut from the day, recommended to the director and producer, who decide

Principles of the craft

• Schedule the constraints first: daylight, cast availability, stunts, children, animals and location access are fixed points, and creative preference gets arranged around them rather than the reverse.
• The schedule is a forecast that has to be re-forecast hourly: knowing at 11am that the day is forty minutes down is what makes it recoverable, and finding out at 6pm is what makes it lost.
• Ask every department for their real setup time, then hold them to it: an AD who plans on optimistic numbers loses the trust that makes a floor run.
• Protect the scene that matters: every day has one setup the film depends on, and the AD's job is to make sure it is not the one shot in the last twenty minutes.
• Authority comes from information, not volume: a floor obeys an AD who always knows what is next, and stops listening to one who shouts.
• Safety is not a competing priority: fatigue, rushed stunts and shortcuts around hazards are how people get hurt, and the AD is the person positioned to stop it.

Common mistakes

• Building a schedule from page counts alone, ignoring how many setups each scene really needs
• Not telling the director that the day is behind until it cannot be fixed
• Calling cast and crew far earlier than they are needed, which burns goodwill and hours
• Letting a company work through fatigue because the schedule says so
• The competent version: making the day every day by quietly shaving the coverage the edit was going to need

How to learn it

Exercises and routes in, not a reading list.

• Break down and schedule a twenty-page short as a stripboard, with a day count and a day-out-of-days. Then have someone who has shot it tell you where your schedule was fiction.
• Estimate the setup time for six setups of a scene, then shoot it and record the actual times. Keep the comparison; it is the beginning of a real instinct.
• Produce a full call sheet for a day, including sunrise, meal times, cast calls and department notes, and distribute it. Every question you get back is a gap in it.
• Run a floor for one day on a small shoot with the explicit job of tracking pace and calling the moment when a setup must be dropped. Say it out loud when it comes.