Stills coverage planning, without the spreadsheet panic.
ShootBuddy turns a production’s one-liner into a living publicity plan, so you shoot the right days, cover every principal and storyline, and never get that sick feeling after the wrap that something vital was missed.
Missing coverage flagged
Photographer days tracked
Searchable, shareable.
See the shoot as a living board, not a static spreadsheet. The days, scenes, cast, locations, and coverage choices stay visible together, so missed moments are easier to spot before they become expensive.
Share summaries of your publicity plan or invite internal and external team members to view or contribute to the schedule and your coverage strategy.
From a PDF to a plan you can defend, in minutes.
ShootBuddy follows the actual rhythm of stills planning: import the one-liner, search for the valuable scenes, track the gaps, respond to schedule changes, and share a plan everyone can shoot from.
Drop in the one-liner.
Upload the production’s one-liner PDF and ShootBuddy reads scenes, cast, shoot days, locations, episode blocks, day/night, and interior/exterior into a structured, searchable stripboard.
Plan coverage on a board built for stills.
See which principals are in each scene and day, filter by cast, scene type, location, and priority, then place photographers on the days that matter most.
Balance coverage against cost.
Assign photographers to specific shoot days and keep night work, travel, and local-hire opportunities visible while decisions are still flexible.
Catch the gaps.
Highlight each character’s first day on set, summarise what episodes and scenes are covered, and automatically flag characters who won’t be covered by your current stills days plan whilst it’s not too late to do something about it.
When the schedule moves, your plan moves with it.
Import an updated one-liner and ShootBuddy highlights the changes that impact publicity coverage, so you can re-plan without starting over.
Share a professional plan.
Export a polished coverage report for the producer, photographer, and wider team, complete with priorities, scene notes, and the brief for the day.
Updated one-liner? ShootBuddy shows exactly what changed.
Schedules move because productions move. Upload the newest one-liner and ShootBuddy compares it against your current plan, then flags the changes that matter: scenes that moved days, cast now appearing on different coverage days, locations that changed, night work that appeared, and planned photographer days that may no longer cover what you thought they did.
Instead of rebuilding the plan or scanning two PDFs line by line, you get a focused change report that tells you where to look, what is at risk, and which coverage decisions need another pass.
12 changes found
Coverage risk
Cost impact
Opportunity
Because photographer days are the budget.
ShootBuddy keeps the trade-off in front of you: every extra day is money, every missed day is campaign risk, and every local hire can protect spend without weakening coverage.
Living source of truth
One plan for days, cast, scenes, locations, priorities, notes, and coverage status.
Silent coverage gaps
Missing principals and key moments are surfaced while you still have time to add a day.
Planning stages connected
Import, filter, assign, summarise, track changes, and export without the spreadsheet drift.
Make the plan look as professional as the thinking behind it.
A clean report means the photographer arrives briefed, the producer sees the reasoning, and closed-set notes or sensitive scenes travel with the plan.
Find the right photographer near your shooting area.
ShootBuddy helps you discover photographers local to your production’s shooting area, so you can protect the budget by reducing accommodation and travel costs without compromising on coverage.
Search by locality, then go deeper by the specific skills or fit you need. Whether the day calls for an action specialist, underwater experience, key art expertise, or someone who understands a particular production style, ShootBuddy helps surface photographers who match the brief.
Save photographers to your roster, add your own trusted contacts, and link them directly to production schedules inside ShootBuddy so the right names stay connected to the right shoot days.
Photographers on ShootBuddy are either invited by the ShootBuddy team or have demonstrated professional-level experience as unit stills and key art photographers. It is not an open index that anyone can join, meaning you can trust the photographers you find.
The details you cannot live without once you discover them.
ShootBuddy is full of practical planning tools built around the details that decide whether a stills day actually covers what you need.
Ask ShootBuddy to highlight the first time any cast member comes on set, making it easier to track first days and avoid missing guest actors who only appear briefly, especially when the schedule keeps changing.
Search for individual cast or specific cast combinations to spot the rare days when the right people are together and the group photo opportunity is strongest.
The days out of days view lets you sort by the number of cast in each day and choose which cast you care about, helping you optimise photographer days based on how many key cast will be on set.
The cast tab of the summary page shows which actors your coverage plan includes and who is still missing, so you can adjust the plan before press images are needed.
Built for everyone who answers for the photography.
One place for every production
Manage a slate without scattering coverage across spreadsheets, PDFs, inboxes, and memory.
Guardrails for lean shows
Save money by finding local photographers and by automatically counting coverage days, nights and splits. Automatically prioritise limited stills days by how many cast are on set.
Consistent oversight
Company-based access and roles help studio photo teams keep output clean and shareable with authorised people across productions.
A brief they can shoot from
Arrive knowing the scenes, cast, priorities, hero moments, and access notes that matter that day.
The shoot only happens once. The gaps are forever.
You do not get a reshoot for the publicity stills. When the unit wraps, whatever you captured is what the campaign has to work with: the poster, EPK, social, festival deck, and press.
If a principal never got a strong frame, if the hero costume was never on a photographer’s day, or if a storyline slipped through after the schedule moved, that is not a problem you fix later.
Problems teams have without ShootBuddy:
New one-liners mean manual cross-checking
A new PDF lands. Scenes, cast, days, locations need to be checked again to make sure nothing in your publicity plan needs reworking.
Coverage lives in someone’s head
Questions like “have we got Elena’s first day?” or “what about the beach sequence?” stay uncertain until it is too late to act.
Photographers booked on the wrong days
Stop photographers hearing “you should have been here yesterday” because the scenes moved days and you missed that key moment you needed.
The schedule changes and the plan drifts
Call sheets and one-liners move constantly. The spreadsheet version of the publicity plan quietly falls out of sync, hiding risk until the shoot has moved on.
Less guesswork. More campaign value.
Without ShootBuddy
- Tedious and error-prine manual cross-referencing of every new schedule.
- “Did we cover everyone?” answered after the wrap.
- Photographer’s assigned on suboptimal days.
- Unable to find local photographers.
- Scenes missed when the schedule changes.
- Coverage living in one person’s head or on multiple documents.
With ShootBuddy
- Import once into a structured, searchable plan.
- Coverage gaps flagged before the shoot.
- The highest-value days chosen on evidence.
- Local photographers surfaced up front to save on budget.
- Versioned schedules that show exactly what moved.
- A shareable, defensible plan the whole team can use.
ShootBuddy is coming soon. Free beta access opens shortly.
The shoot is the one thing you cannot redo. Register your interest now to become a free beta tester and help shape the coverage-planning tool built for film and television publicity teams.