Call Sheets & Shooting Schedules

Here is how this works in practice. Call sheets for productions running through Hungary have to bridge two languages, two pay-schedule conventions and a state-holiday calendar that global producers will not have on the wall. We issue bilingual EN/HU sheets with crew-side notes in Magyar (turnaround per Magyar Színészek Szakszervezete and HSC conventions, Hungarian addresses with kerület district numbers, BKV transit references) and producer-side notes in English (script day, scene/page count, weather call, hospital nearest to unit). Winter shoots between Dec and Feb run on a shifted clock.

Here is the short of it. Budapest sunrise around 07:30 and sunset around 16:15. So first-call, magic-hour and pickup windows compress against the studio's overtime budget. Plus we build the day backwards from the ready daylight rather than from a fixed 06:30 crew call. State-holiday blackouts (March 15 1848 Revolution, August 20 Saint Stephen's Day, October 23 1956 Revolution) and the practical-traffic blackouts around the Sziget Festival in August, the Budapest Spring Festival, the Cannes May travel week and the Berlinale February travel week are pre-marked on the production calendar so a 14-hour day doesn't roll into a national holiday at golden time.

Here is the breakdown. Distribution runs through Movie Magic Scheduling exports, Studio Binder PDFs and an SMS/WhatsApp confirmation tree because not every Hungarian department head sits inside the production's StudioBinder seat allocation. We confirm receipt against the crew list before 19:00 on the day prior, version-control any post-19:00 changes with a colour-coded revision header. Plus push push-notifications to the studio's first-AD channel as soon as the locked version goes out. Schengen border-crossing logistics for cross-border splinter units. Vienna 2.5h west, Bratislava 2h north, Cluj 5h east.

Here is what that looks like on the ground. Sit on the call sheet under a dedicated travel block so drivers know which checkpoint they will use and which carnet copy travels with the gear truck. For NFI rebate-claim purposes, every issued sheet is archived in the production's audit folder with shift totals, meal break compliance and the daily crew count broken out Hungarian vs global, because the 30% rebate auditors will read those numbers line-by-line.