What is planning?
Planning turns an idea into a sequence. It takes the brief and the creative concept and answers the practical questions: what the deliverables are, what has to happen before each one, who does it, how long it takes, what it costs and where the risks sit. The output is a plan: a timeline with milestones, a budget, a list of people and a short list of the decisions the client has to make along the way.
In a creative agency and production studio, planning has two layers. Strategic planning decides what the work should say and to whom. Production planning decides how it gets made: locations, crew, shoot days, edit weeks, review rounds. Both have to be done before the first dollar is spent, and both have to be revisited the moment something changes.
Why it matters
Why planning matters
Creative work is expensive to change late. A line of script cut in pre-production costs nothing; the same line cut after the shoot costs a day of crew and talent that cannot be recovered. Planning front-loads the decisions so the expensive days are spent making, not deciding. It is also how a client knows what they are buying: a plan with dates and owners is a promise they can hold you to.
Bad planning rarely looks bad at the start. It looks optimistic. It shows up later as a compressed edit, a rushed grade and a delivery that arrives on time only because someone worked all weekend.
In practice
How planning works in practice
- 01
Start from the fixed date. Almost every project has one (a launch, a season opener, a store opening, a holiday) and the plan is built backward from it, placing delivery, final review, the edit, the shoot and pre-production in reverse order, with buffer between each.
- 02
Then size each phase with the people who will do it. The editor estimates the edit, the producer estimates pre-production, the director says how many shoot days the idea needs. A plan made by one person in a spreadsheet is a guess; a plan made with the team is an estimate.
- 03
Next, cost it. Every phase has people, equipment, locations and post, and the budget is built line by line from the same plan, so the money and the schedule describe the same project.
- 04
Finally, name the risks and the decisions. Weather, talent availability and client approvals are the usual ones. Each gets an owner and a date by which it must be resolved, and the plan is reviewed weekly against what actually happened.
At RIOT
Planning at RIOT
Some of our work is built around a single day. A mascot reveal like Major Tuddy for the Washington Commanders, with the "Making the Mascot" documentary behind it, has one date that everything else answers to. Krova, our production software, keeps bids, schedules, budgets and delivery in one place, so a plan that changes on Tuesday is still one plan on Wednesday, and the budget sees every move the schedule makes.
Watch out
What people get wrong about planning
Planning the happy path. A plan with no buffer assumes every approval arrives on time and every shoot day gets its weather. None of them do. Build slack in at the points you cannot control, and say where it is. The second mistake is treating the plan as finished once it is approved. A plan that has not changed by week three is not being used.
And planning in detail too far out. Plan the next month to the day and the quarter to the week.
