If you’ve ever been a 1st AD, producer, or production coordinator the night before a shoot, you know the ritual: chase the location address, copy-paste sunrise and sunset, Google the nearest hospital, double-check parking, hope the crew contact list is current. It’s a 45-minute grind that happens at 11pm, every shoot day, without fail. And if you’re on the other side of it — watching your inbox at midnight, knowing your call time is in nine hours and the sheet still hasn’t landed — you know that feeling too.
I built this template to close that gap. Drop in your shoot location and the sheet pulls the weather forecast for your shoot date, finds the nearest emergency room, calculates drive times between locations, and formats everything into a clean, phone-readable PDF. The repetitive stuff is handled. What’s left is the judgment call work that actually needs your attention.
Additional features include:
- Auto-Populating Weather Forecast
- Nearest Hospital Lookup
- Location Drive Time and Distance Calculations
- Google Maps Directions
- Sunrise and Sunset for Filming Location
- Call Time, Meal, and Wrap Calculations
- Copy Email Addresses in Bulk
- Crew Sync for Multi-Day Shoots
- Export Print-Friendly PDF
- And more
It’s powered entirely by Google Sheets + Apps Script, with the Open-Meteo and Google Maps APIs doing the heavy lifting in the background. No Notion. No Airtable. No subscription. Just a spreadsheet that does what spreadsheets do best.
I’ll cover what’s in the template, how it works, and how to set it up below. Skip ahead if you’d like.
Why I Built This Call Sheet Template
The best call sheets strike a balance between form and function. It doesn’t need to be pretty, but it does need to be visually organized in a way that communicates the most important information at a glance and then allows you to dig deeper to easily find specific information pertaining to you or your department.
The existing free templates I found were either static PDFs that didn’t update, visually unappealing spreadsheets, or they required a paid platform login. I wanted something that relayed the key info with a good visual structure, felt professional, and had advanced functions built in that simply worked. A sheet I could hand off to a producer or PA without explaining a new tool or paying for a recurring subscription.
I have roughly 20 years of experience in the industry and have seen a wide range of call sheets. I work mostly on commercial, documentary, and non-profit shoots, and a lot of those productions don’t have the budget (or the headcount) for a full production office running StudioBinder. But the logistical needs are exactly the same. Maybe more so, because we’re often shooting in unfamiliar locations with smaller crews and tighter turnarounds. Knowing the forecast isn’t optional when you’ve got an outdoor scene at 6am. Knowing the nearest hospital before a medical incident isn’t paranoia, it’s basic care for the crew.
Who This Is For
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Indie filmmakers and documentary crews who don’t need (or want to pay for) StudioBinder.
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Commercial photographers and videographers running smaller-budget shoots where the producer is also the 1st AC is also the colorist.
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Non-profit and editorial productions that need a professional call sheet without the SaaS overhead.
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Production coordinators who want to spend less time on data entry and more time solving actual problems.
If you’re running a $2M commercial with a full production office, you’ve already got a system. This isn’t for you. If you’re running everything else, this smart call sheet template is for you.
What the Template Does
The core of Call Sheet Template Pro is found in the custom menu item, Call Sheet Tools. This set of tools allows you to quickly set up and send your call sheet, with minimal need to directly edit cells.
Most of the heavy lifting happens through Project Setup. It’s where you start every shoot day. One modal input handles your project info, schedule, locations, and call time all at once, and once you save it, the sheet populates: weather forecast for your shoot date, nearest emergency room, drive times between locations, and all your time calculations. That’s the core loop.
From there, the rest of the tools handle the ongoing work: adding crew without hunting through cells, shifting call times when the schedule moves, syncing your roster to day two or day three, and getting the call sheet out the door—either as a PDF, a direct email to crew, or a calendar invite. The suite is designed so that by the time you’re ready to send, the only thing you’ve manually typed is the information only you know.
Call Sheet Setup in Action
Full Feature List
- Project Setup Wizard — enter project title, client, agency, production company, shoot days, dates, call time, shoot hours, meal settings, and job number in one guided modal; auto-fills all relevant cells
- Add Crew — add a crew member to any department by role, name, phone, and email without scrolling the sheet
- Refresh Location & Weather — pulls live weather for your shoot date, finds the nearest hospital from the centroid of all entered locations, adds Google Maps links to location cells, and calculates drive times between locations
- Sync Crew to Other Days — copies the full crew roster from the active day tab to all other shoot day tabs in one click; locations, dates, weather, and notes stay untouched
- Bulk Adjust Call Times — shift call times for selected departments by 30-minute increments; useful when a shoot start gets pushed or pulled
- Export as PDF — generates a single-page letter landscape PDF with a pre-flight weather refresh; ability to hide or show client contact info; downloads with a clean filename for chronological sorting
- Export Calendar Invite — standalone ICS export; event organizer defaults to your Google account, but any production department contact can be chosen
- Send Call Sheet to Crew — emails the PDF call sheet and an ICS calendar invite to selected departments using your Google account
- Copy Email Addresses — collects email addresses by department so you can paste them into your own mail app and send manually
- Schedule 6 AM Weather Refresh — sets a one-time trigger to auto-refresh weather the morning of your shoot
- Refresh Header Contacts — re-syncs Director, Producer, 1st AD, and Craft Services Lead into the header area after manual roster edits
- Tidy Crew Roster — consolidates each department by shifting filled entries to the top of each role group, closing gaps left by deleted crew members; rows are never removed
- Clear Crew Data — wipes name, phone, and email for selected departments while preserving role labels and call times
- Reset Call Sheet Data — restores template defaults on the active tab for reuse on a new project; everything except crew can be cleared, and you choose what to include
How It Works (For the Curious)
You don’t need to understand any of this to use it. But if you’re the type who wants to know what’s running underneath, here’s the plain version.
The template is a standard Google Sheet with a bound Apps Script—Google’s built-in scripting environment, essentially JavaScript that lives inside the file. When you run a tool from the menu, the script wakes up, makes its API calls in the background, and writes the results into the appropriate cells. Nothing is installed on your computer. Nothing runs unless you trigger it.
For anything location-based (drive times, directions links, the nearest hospital) the script sends your shoot address to the Google Maps Geocoding API, converts it to coordinates, and then uses those coordinates to query Places and Directions. That’s why a venue name or an incomplete address still works: the geocoder cleans it up before anything else runs.
Weather and sunrise/sunset come from Open-Meteo, a free weather API that doesn’t require an account or a key. The script passes the coordinates from your geocoded location and requests the forecast for your specific shoot date—not today’s weather, not the current hour, but the full-day forecast for the date in your call sheet. Sunrise and sunset come from the same response.
That’s the full stack: Google Sheets holds the data, Apps Script runs the logic, Google Maps handles location, and Open-Meteo handles weather. No external accounts to set up. No dashboard to log into. It’s all contained in one file.
Purchase Call Sheet Template Pro
Call Sheet Template Pro + Call Sheets tools is available in two licensing options. An individual license for $89 or a studio (3 seats) license for $199. Purchase once, use it forever.
Upon purchase, you’ll receive your unique license key and a link to download the PDF documentation which includes a link to the Google Sheets file.
Conclusion
Call sheets are one of those quiet, unglamorous documents that hold a production together. A good one prevents confusion, keeps the crew safe, and respects everyone’s time. A bad one costs you the day. Spend the time you save on the parts of production that actually need your attention. If you use it on a project, I’d love to hear how it goes! Tag me or send a message—I’m always tweaking it.
Product links on this site may be affiliate links that give me a very small kickback, and costs the buyer nothing extra. For example, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases after a link leading to Amazon is clicked. Other links may earn me affiliate commissions as well. This helps offset the cost of running the site. I have at times accepted and at other times declined free products. I promote what I love and use, and will not write about a product that I don’t appreciate and own.
– Andrew