The Short Film Pre-Production Checklist: Every Document You Need From Idea to Shoot Day

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By Justkay, Documentary Filmmaker and Founder of Storyflow Published August 30, 2026 · 15 min read · Filmmaking

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Table of Contents

1. Quick Answer: The Eight Documents a Short Film Needs
2. The Checklist at a Glance
3. The Order Is the Method
4. Document 1: The One Page
5. Document 2: The Script
6. Document 3: The Script Breakdown
7. Document 4: The Look Book
8. Document 5: The Storyboard
9. Document 6: The Shot List
10. Document 7: The Schedule
11. Document 8: The Budget
12. The Call Sheet
13. Which Tools to Use for Each Document
14. The Six Week Timeline
15. What to Cut When You Are Out of Time
16. The Five Failures That Actually Kill Shoot Days
17. FAQ: Short Film Pre-Production
18. The Bottom Line
19. Author
20. Related Reading

1) Quick Answer: The Eight Documents a Short Film Needs

Planning a short film from idea to shoot means producing eight documents, in this order: the one page, the script, the script breakdown, the look book, the storyboard, the shot list, the schedule, and the budget. A call sheet is generated from the last three for each shoot day.

Every one of those eight answers a question somebody will ask you on set. If a document does not exist, that question gets answered on the day by whoever is nearest, which is how short films lose their afternoons.

The single most useful ordering rule: the breakdown comes before the look book, and the shot list comes before the schedule. Most first time filmmakers do both the other way round and pay for it with a shoot day that runs out of light.

Key Takeaways

• Eight documents, in order: one page, script, breakdown, look book, storyboard, shot list, schedule, budget.
• The breakdown is the hinge. It converts a script into a list of things that must be acquired, and everything downstream depends on it.
• The shot list determines the schedule, not the other way round. Schedule by location and light, then order shots inside each block.
• A storyboard is optional. A shot list is not. You can shoot without drawings. You cannot shoot without knowing what the shots are.
• The budget is a document, not a number. Write it before the schedule is locked, so cuts are creative choices rather than emergencies.
• Six weeks is a comfortable pre-production window for a ten minute short. Three is possible. One is a story you will tell later.

2) The Checklist at a Glance

3) The Order Is the Method

The list above is not a menu. It is a dependency chain, and the order is the part that does the work.

Each document consumes the one before it. The breakdown is generated by reading the script. The shot list is generated by reading the script against the look book and the storyboard. The schedule is generated by grouping the shot list by location and light. The budget is generated by pricing the breakdown and the schedule together.

Do them out of order and the failure mode is always the same: you build something on an assumption, the assumption changes, and the whole downstream document is wrong without anyone noticing. Two examples I have watched cost real money:

A schedule built before the shot list. The producer blocks two days because two days felt right. The shot list, written later, has 47 setups. Two days is 24 setups. Nobody discovers this until day one at lunch, and by then the crew is booked and the location is confirmed. The film gets made by cutting shots at random, in a hurry, by a director who has not slept.

A look book built before the breakdown. The director builds a beautiful reference board around a rain-soaked night exterior. The breakdown, done later, reveals that the night exterior needs a rain machine, a generator, a permit and a night shoot the lead cannot do. The look book has already set everyone's expectations, so the film spends three weeks trying to afford an image instead of two hours choosing a different one.

Neither of those is a failure of effort. Both are a failure of sequence.

4) Document 1: The One Page

Answers: what is this film. Time: one hour. Length: one page, genuinely.

The one page is the only document that exists to be argued with. It contains the logline, a short synopsis, the tone, the intended length, and one sentence on why this film rather than another. It is the thing you send to a producer, a DP, a lead actor, and it is the document that tells you whether you have a film or a scene.

What goes on it

• Logline: one sentence, protagonist, want, obstacle
• Synopsis: three to five sentences with the ending included, because a synopsis that hides the ending is a pitch not a plan
• Tone: two or three comparison titles, plus one specific thing you will not do
• Runtime target
• The reason: one sentence on what makes this worth eleven minutes of a stranger's life

The test. Read it to somebody who has not heard about the film. If they ask what happens at the end, the synopsis is not doing its job. If they say it sounds like something else, you have found the thing to change now rather than in the edit.

5) Document 2: The Script

Answers: what happens, and what is said. Time: one to three weeks. Length: roughly one page per minute.

For a short, a page is a minute is close enough to plan against. A ten minute short is around ten pages, and that number is what the whole rest of pre-production sizes itself to.

Format properly, in Final Draft, Fade In, Celtx, Highland or WriterDuet. This is not aesthetic pedantry. Standard format is what makes the page-per-minute estimate work, what makes the breakdown possible, and what tells a crew member reading it at 6am where they are.

Specific to shorts

• Start as late into the scene as you can and leave as early as possible. Shorts die of preamble
• Two locations is comfortable. Four is expensive. Six is a different film
• Every speaking role costs a day of casting, a release form and a person who has to be fed
• Anything written as "they drive through the city" is a half day you did not budget for

Lock the script before the breakdown. Not because it will not change, but because the breakdown of an unlocked script has to be redone, and redoing it is four hours you will not have twice.

6) Document 3: The Script Breakdown

Answers: what must we acquire. Time: three to five hours. This is the hinge of the whole process.

The breakdown is where a story becomes a logistics problem. You go through the script scene by scene and pull out every element that has to be found, booked, bought, borrowed or built.

The standard categories

• Cast, and background performers
• Locations, with interior or exterior and day or night
• Props, meaning anything an actor touches
• Wardrobe, per character per scene
• Set dressing
• Special equipment: dolly, drone, gimbal, jib
• Vehicles
• Special effects, stunts, animals, minors
• Sound requirements: playback, wild lines, practical noise problems

Go scene by scene and be pedantic. A phone that rings is a prop, a sound cue, and a continuity item. A cup of coffee is a prop, a wardrobe risk and, if there are three takes, three cups of coffee.

Why this document is the hinge. Everything downstream reads it. The budget prices it. The schedule groups it. The look book has to stay inside it. A short film that gets into trouble almost always got into trouble in an element that was in the script and never made it onto a list.

The output. One row per element, tagged to a scene number. A spreadsheet is fine. Filmustage, StudioBinder and Celtx will generate a first pass automatically from a formatted script, which is worth doing even if you then correct it by hand, because the machine will not skip scene 14 the way a tired person will at 1am.

7) Document 4: The Look Book

Answers: what does this look and feel like. Time: one day. Length: 10 to 20 pages, or one board.

The look book is how the director stops describing the film in adjectives. It carries reference images for lighting, colour, framing, wardrobe, location texture and, if it matters, movement.

What actually belongs in it

• Three to five hero images that define the film, and one labelled "not this"
• Lighting references, labelled as lighting, one per major scene or location
• Colour: five swatches pulled from the references rather than described
• Framing and lens feel: wide and close examples, and the aspect ratio
• Wardrobe and character, separated from everything else
• Location texture

The labelling rule. An unlabelled reference is a mood. Everyone on the crew reads the same image differently, and they will each be confident. Write one line under every image saying what it is a reference for. This single habit removes more on-set disagreement than any other thing on this page.

Build it after the breakdown. The breakdown tells you what you can actually get. A look book built inside those constraints is a plan; one built outside them is a wish that everybody has now seen.

8) Document 5: The Storyboard

Answers: how is it framed and cut. Time: one to three days. Optional, and worth it for specific scenes.

You do not need to storyboard a whole short. Most working directors board three kinds of scene and skip the rest.

Board these

• Anything with an effect, a stunt, or a shot that has to be composited
• Anything with complicated geography, where the audience needs to know where people are relative to each other
• The scene the whole film rests on, so the DP and the editor and you are looking at the same thing
• Anything you will only get one take at

Skip these

• Dialogue scenes between two people in a room. A shot list covers it
• Anything you will find on the day with actors who are better than your drawings

You do not need to draw. A storyboard exists to tell a crew what the shot is. Reference photographs, phone snaps of the location with a person standing in frame, screenshots from other films, and labelled boxes all do that job. Drawing ability affects how pretty the board is and almost nothing about how well it communicates.

9) Document 6: The Shot List

Answers: what exactly are we shooting. Time: three to four hours. Never skip this.

If you take one thing from this page: the shot list is the document that runs the day. Not the script, not the storyboard. The 1st AD reads the shot list, the DP reads the shot list, and the reason a day finishes on time is that somebody counted the setups before the day started.

One row per shot, with these columns

• Scene number
• Shot number
• Size: WS, MS, MCU, CU, ECU
• Angle and height
• Movement: static, pan, tilt, dolly, handheld
• Lens, if the DP has a view
• Description: one line
• Cast in shot
• Equipment needed
• Estimated setup time
• Priority: must have, should have, nice to have

The two columns most people leave out are the two that matter. Estimated setup time turns a shot list into a schedule. Priority turns a bad day into a survivable one, because when you lose ninety minutes to rain, you cut the nice-to-haves in ten seconds instead of arguing for twenty minutes.

The count that decides everything. Add up the setups. A small crew with a simple lighting setup manages roughly three to five setups an hour on dialogue and one to two on anything lit or moving. Multiply, add 25% for the things that go wrong, and compare with the hours of usable light. If the numbers do not work, they will not work on the day either, and now is when it is free to fix.

10) Document 7: The Schedule

Answers: in what order, on what day, at what time. Time: two to four hours.

Schedules are built by grouping, and the grouping order is fixed by cost.

Group in this order

1. By location. Moving a crew costs an hour minimum and usually two. Shoot everything at a location before you leave it, regardless of script order
2. By interior or exterior and by light. Exteriors are hostage to the sun and the weather. Book them first and keep an interior in reserve as a rain cover
3. By cast. If an actor is available for one day, everything they are in happens that day
4. By setup. Within a location, shoot everything on one lighting setup before changing it. This is where a shot list ordered by scene number quietly wastes two hours

Then build the day

• Call time, and be honest that the first setup takes longer than you think
• A meal break every six hours. This is not optional and skipping it costs more in the afternoon than it saves
• Company moves marked as their own blocks with real times
• Wrap time, written down, and treated as real

Leave the last 45 minutes of every day empty. It will be used. If it is not, you get pickups and cutaways, which the editor will thank you for more than any other single thing on the day.

11) Document 8: The Budget

Answers: what does this cost, and what are we cutting. Time: two to three hours.

Price the breakdown, then price the schedule, then add the things neither of them contains.

The line items shorts forget

• Food, for everyone, every day, including the people who said not to worry about them
• Transport and parking, which on a city shoot is more than the equipment
• Hard drives, and a second copy of the hard drives
• Insurance, which most rental houses and many locations require before they will talk to you
• Permits and location fees
• Festival submission fees, if this film is meant to go anywhere
• Sound post and the composer, which is where shorts most often run out of money after the shoot
• A 10% contingency that you do not spend until day one

The most useful thing a budget does is force a conversation early. A budget written before the schedule is locked lets you decide, calmly, that the crane shot is not worth a day. A budget written after means the same decision gets made at 4pm on a Saturday by whoever is angriest.

12) The Call Sheet

Answers: where do I go and when. One per shoot day. Thirty minutes to produce.

Generated from the schedule, the shot list and the breakdown, and sent the night before.

What is on it

• Date, day number, weather, sunrise and sunset
• Location address, plus parking instructions and the nearest hospital
• Call times per person, which are not all the same
• The scenes and shots being covered, in order
• Meal time
• Cast, crew and emergency contacts
• A note about anything unusual: a minor, an animal, a stunt, a road

The nearest hospital line is on every professional call sheet because it is occasionally needed and because putting it there tells a crew, in one line, that the people running this shoot have thought about them.

13) Which Tools to Use for Each Document

Nobody uses one tool for all eight, and the honest recommendation is a small stack rather than a single product.

StudioBinder is the strongest single purchase for a short film, because breakdown, shot list, schedule and call sheets all live in it and feed each other. If you buy one thing, buy this.

Celtx is the best value if you want script and breakdown linked in one product on a small budget.

Milanote and Canva are where look books get made. Canva if a producer or funder is seeing it, Milanote while you are still gathering.

Storyflow is worth a look if the thing that keeps going wrong is that these eight documents live in eight places and none of them know about each other. The one page, the look book references, the shot list and the schedule sit on one canvas as real documents, and the AI reads the whole board, so "draft the shot list from this script and this look book" is a request that has the script and the look book in front of it. Paid only during early access, from $7.99 per month billed annually, with a Free plan launching before the end of 2026 and invited collaborators joining free now. What it is not: it does not generate call sheets, stripboards or a budget, and StudioBinder and Movie Magic do. For running a set, use those.

A spreadsheet is not the wrong answer. Every document in this list has been produced in a spreadsheet by somebody making a better film than most. The tool matters far less than whether the document exists.

14) The Six Week Timeline

For a ten minute short with a small crew. Compress proportionally if you have less, but keep the order.

Week 1. One page. Script draft. Send the one page to the two or three people whose no would change the film.

Week 2. Script revisions to a locked draft. Start location scouting, because locations take the longest to say yes.

Week 3. Script breakdown. First pass budget. This is the week you find out what the film actually is.

Week 4. Look book with the DP. Casting. Confirm locations and permits. Storyboard the two or three scenes that need it.

Week 5. Shot list with the DP. Schedule from the shot list. Lock the budget. Book equipment and crew.

Week 6. Rehearsal or a read through. Tech recce at each location with the DP and the 1st AD. Call sheets for day one. Buy the props you have been putting off.

The one deadline to protect: the shot list has to exist before the schedule is sent to anyone. Everything else can slip.

15) What to Cut When You Are Out of Time

In this order, and stop when you have enough time back.

1. The storyboard. Board only the two shots you cannot afford to get wrong.
2. The look book's polish. Keep the images and the labels, lose the layout.
3. The formal budget. Keep the list of what costs money and the total. Lose the categories.
4. Rehearsal. Painful, and recoverable with a good cast and an extra take.
5. The tech recce. Very painful. Send the DP a video walkthrough on a phone instead.

Never cut: the breakdown, the shot list, the schedule, or the call sheet. Those four are what turn a plan into a day. A short film shot without a shot list is a film shot twice, once badly and once in the edit where the coverage does not exist.

16) The Five Failures That Actually Kill Shoot Days

From my own productions and from watching other people's.

The setup count was never done. The single most common cause of a short film that does not finish. Somebody wrote a shot list and nobody added up the setups against the daylight.

The location changed and nothing downstream was updated. The look book, the shot list and the schedule were all built around the first location. The second one has windows on the wrong side and no power.

One person held the plan in their head. They got sick, or they were dealing with a parking dispute during the exact fifteen minutes the decision needed making.

The gear list was never checked against the shot list. Half the shots need a slider. The slider was never booked because it lived in the DP's memory rather than in the breakdown.

Nobody wrote down when the day ends. A day without a wrap time expands until the crew is exhausted, the last scene is the worst scene in the film, and three people do not come back for day two.

Every one of those is a document that did not exist or was not read. None of them is a creative failure, and all of them show up in the finished film.

17) FAQ: Short Film Pre-Production

How do I plan a short film from idea to shoot? Produce eight documents in order: the one page, the script, the script breakdown, the look book, the storyboard, the shot list, the schedule and the budget. Then generate a call sheet per shoot day. The breakdown must come before the look book, and the shot list must come before the schedule, because each document is built by reading the one before it.

How long does pre-production take for a short film? Around six weeks is comfortable for a ten minute short with a small crew. Three weeks is possible if the script is locked and the locations are secured. Under two weeks, something in the list gets skipped and it is usually the shot list, which is the one that costs you the shoot day.

What is a script breakdown and do I really need one? It is a scene by scene list of every element that must be acquired: cast, locations, props, wardrobe, equipment, effects. Yes, you need one. It is the document the budget and the schedule are both built from, and every short film disaster I have seen traces back to an element that was in the script and never made it onto a list.

Do I need a storyboard for a short film? No, not for the whole thing. Board the scenes with effects, complicated geography, or one shot you cannot afford to get wrong. Dialogue scenes are covered by a shot list. You also do not need to draw: reference photos and labelled boxes communicate a shot as well as a sketch.

What is the difference between a storyboard and a shot list? A storyboard shows how a shot is framed. A shot list says what shots exist, in what order, with what equipment and how long each takes to set up. The storyboard is optional. The shot list runs the day.

How many shots can you get in a day on a short film? Roughly three to five setups an hour for simple dialogue with a small crew, one to two for anything lit or with movement. Multiply by usable hours, add 25% for things going wrong, and compare with your shot list before you book anything.

What should a short film budget include that people forget? Food for everyone every day, transport and parking, a second copy of the hard drives, insurance, permits, festival submission fees, sound post and the composer, and a 10% contingency. Sound post is where shorts most often run out of money after the shoot is over.

What software should I use to plan a short film? StudioBinder if you buy one thing, since breakdown, shot list, schedule and call sheets feed each other in it. Celtx for script and breakdown on a smaller budget. Canva or Milanote for the look book. Spreadsheets are a completely respectable answer for the breakdown, shot list, schedule and budget.

Is Storyflow free for planning a short film? Not during early access. Storyflow is paid only for now, from $7.99 per month billed annually, with a Free plan launching before the end of 2026. Anyone a paid member invites to a board joins free today, which covers a DP or producer who only needs to read and comment.

What is the one thing most first time filmmakers get wrong? Building the schedule before the shot list. It produces a day that was never possible, and nobody discovers it until the crew is already booked.

18) The Bottom Line

Eight documents, in order, and the order is doing most of the work. One page, script, breakdown, look book, storyboard, shot list, schedule, budget. Call sheet per day.

If you are short on time, cut the storyboard and the look book polish. Never cut the breakdown, the shot list, the schedule or the call sheet, because those four are what convert a good idea into a day that finishes.

And before you send the schedule to a single person, add up the setups on your shot list and compare them with the hours of light you have. That one piece of arithmetic, done for free at a kitchen table, prevents more short film disasters than every tool on this page combined.

If keeping eight documents in eight applications is the part that keeps breaking, put the next one on a single board where the script, the references and the shot list can see each other, and see whether the answers get faster.

19) Author

Justkay is a documentary filmmaker and the founder of Storyflow. He has run productions where the plan lived in a treatment app, a spreadsheet, a call sheet tool and an edit notes doc, and watched details fall out at every handover, which is what Storyflow was built to stop.

20) Related Reading

• How to Plan a Short Film from Idea to Shoot (2026 Step-by-Step Guide)
• How to Plan a Short Film with AI: A 2026 Pre-Production Workflow
• The 12 Best Pre-Production Tools in 2026
• The 12 Best Shot List Tools in 2026
• The 12 Best Storyboarding Software Tools in 2026 (Tested for Film and Video)
• The 12 Best Film Production Planning Tools in 2026