How a Festival Production Schedule Is Built, Cue by Cue

When an organiser asks us to plan the workflow for a festival or a live broadcast, the first document we ask for is the running order, not the kit list. Equipment follows from what happens on stage and when. If a headline act needs a camera feed to a screen, a broadcast mix and a stage monitor mix at the same moment, that single requirement decides how many circuits, how many engineers and how much cable we need.

From the running order we build a timeline in fifteen-minute blocks. Each block lists what is live, what is being changed over, and who is touching which piece of equipment. It is dull work, done at a table with a pencil and a printed site plan, but it is where most problems are found. A changeover that looks comfortable on paper at twenty minutes often turns out to share a crew member with the soundcheck on the second stage.

We also ask what the organiser cannot move. Curfews, broadcast slots and headline times are fixed points, and everything else bends around them.

• Running order with set lengths and changeover times
• Site plan showing stages, cable routes and power points
• Broadcast or streaming slots that cannot move
• Any curfew or licensing limit on sound levels

Signal routing is drawn as a diagram long before the production arrives on site. For every source, whether a microphone, a camera or a playback machine, we mark where it enters the system, where it is split, where it is mixed and where it ends up. Front of house, monitors, the broadcast truck and the screens each get their own line.

The point of the diagram is to find single points of failure. If one splitter feeds both the front of house desk and the broadcast mix, a fault in that box takes out both at once. Sometimes the answer is a second splitter; sometimes it is accepting the risk and agreeing a fallback with the crew.

We label every line with the same names on the diagram, the patch sheets and the cable tags. That sounds trivial, but at two in the morning during a rebuild, a name that matches in all three places saves a good deal of argument.

• One name per source, used on every document
• Splits and merges marked where they happen
• Spare lines noted and left unpatched on purpose

A crew plan lists roles, but it has to be built around real people with real limits. A sound engineer who has loaded in at seven, mixed all afternoon and then faces an evening headliner is not at their best, however good they are. We schedule rotations so that the most demanding slots go to people who have had a proper break beforehand.

Hannah, who runs our operations side, drafts the rota and then reads it back as if she were each person on it, asking where they would be standing, what they would be carrying and when they would next eat. Gaps in the rota usually show up at that stage, not before.

We also name a single contact for each stage and for the broadcast side. When something goes wrong, the crew should know whom to call without checking a list, and the organiser should hear about it from one voice rather than five.

• Breaks written into the rota, not left to chance
• One named contact per stage
• Cover for the roles that cannot be left empty

Before any show day we try to walk the site with the plan in hand. Cable runs that looked straightforward on the drawing cross a pedestrian route, or a power point sits behind a bar that will be serving by lunchtime. Finding that on a Tuesday afternoon costs a conversation; finding it on the day costs an incident.

We walk the audio and video routes in the order the signal travels, from stage to desk to truck. This catches distances that are longer than the cable we planned to bring, and places where a join would be exposed to weather. In mid autumn that matters more than people expect, as damp ground and early dusk change how and when a site can be rigged.

Anything we change on the walk goes back into the diagram and the schedule that evening, so that the paper always matches the field.

• Walk routes in signal order, stage to truck
• Check power, weather cover and lighting for load-in
• Update every document the same evening

On the day, the schedule becomes a working document. It is printed, pinned up at each position and read aloud at a short briefing before doors open. Everyone hears the same sequence, the same call words and the same plan for what happens if a set overruns.

We agree in advance how overruns are handled. Cutting a set short is the organiser's decision, but the crew should know the options beforehand: trim the next changeover, drop a lighting cue, or hold the broadcast feed on a holding shot. Having those choices agreed means nobody invents policy over a headset.

During the show, a stage manager or workflow lead keeps a log of actual start and end times. That log is the most useful thing we take away, because it tells us where the plan was optimistic and where it was cautious.

• Printed schedule at every position
• Call words agreed at the briefing
• Actual times logged against the plan

After the event we send the organiser a short written summary: the final schedule, the routing diagram as it was actually patched, and notes on anything that ran differently from the plan. It is written for the next person who has to plan the same event, who may not be us.

The notes are practical rather than polished. They say that the second stage load-in needed another half hour, that a particular cable run was too long, or that a changeover worked better with one extra pair of hands.

A workflow plan is not a one-off document. Festivals repeat, broadcasts return and crews change, and a clear record of what actually happened is worth more than the best forecast we could write on the first attempt.