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ShootBuddy · For unit publicists and photo teams
Turn the one-liner into a working coverage plan in minutes. See what your plan doesn't cover while there's still time to act.
Web-based, nothing to install · From the team behind Image Approvals, trusted on 120+ productions
These are the steps you already take. What changes is where they happen, so the plan sits in one place instead of a spreadsheet, an inbox and somebody's memory.
Upload the PDF exactly as it arrived. ShootBuddy reads scenes, cast, shoot days, locations, day/night and int/ext into a searchable stripboard.
Put photographers on the days that earn them, against the priorities you set and the budget you have.
Principals and key moments your plan doesn't cover are flagged while there's still time to add a day.
Every change that touches your plan is listed for you, so you adjust in minutes instead of comparing two PDFs line by line.
Planning by hand, today
You don't 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. Without ShootBuddy, these are the ways coverage quietly slips:
A new PDF lands at 9pm. Nothing tells you what changed, so scenes, cast, days and locations all need checking again by hand.
Questions like “have we got Elena's first day?” wait on whoever holds the plan in their head, and everything depends on their week.
The photographer hears it because the scenes moved and nobody caught it, and the key moment goes uncovered.
Call sheets and one-liners move constantly. The spreadsheet version quietly falls out of sync, hiding risk until the shoot has moved on.
The planning board
Not the forty days in the schedule. The handful that actually deliver the images the campaign will live on.
Every scene, day, cast member and location is searchable. Flag a key person's first day on set so a guest star's debut doesn't go past you, mark closed sets and VFX scenes to work around, and rank the scenes you care about most.
Ask the board
episode 3 · night scenes · Location B · cast 1, 3 and 5 together
That specific. One filter bar, no spreadsheet.
Photographer days are the budget. When it buys eight days out of forty, you want the eight with the most principal cast on them, not the biggest crowd. The days-out-of-days view sorts every day by the cast on it, filtered to the faces the campaign is built on.
It's also how you find the group shot: search for a cast combination and spot the rare day the right people are on set together.
Coverage gaps
Live, at any point in the shoot, rather than reconstructed from memory the week after wrap. The cast view splits everyone in the schedule into the people your plan photographs and the people it currently doesn't, across unit, gallery, key art, EPK and social.
A gap is cheap to fix on a Tuesday and impossible to fix after wrap.
The same summary breaks coverage down by episode: how many shoot days each one has, how many of those carry photography, and what type. On a series where one day serves three episodes, that's very hard to hold in a spreadsheet, and it's how an episode quietly ends up with nothing.
When the next one-liner arrives, ShootBuddy compares it with the version you planned against and lists what changed, starting with the changes that hit days you had covered.
You read a short summary of what it does to your plan instead of forty pages, while there's still time to rebook the photographer rather than pay for an extra day.
Crew & budget
Put photographers on days and the totals add up as you go: how many days, how many of them nights or splits, and who is covering what. Day, night and split shoots price differently, so the mix driving your spend stays visible while you can still change it.
Then there's the directory. It's invitation only, and every photographer in it has been reviewed by Image Approvals before being listed, so you're choosing from people whose work we know. Tell it what the shoot needs and a strong local gets considered before a flight and two hotel nights do.
The fastest way to judge it is to watch your own one-liner go in and a working coverage plan come out. That takes a call.
Coverage planning is hard because it spans three roles who each hold a third of the picture. ShootBuddy gives all three the same view. The plan stays yours: your publicist runs it, with the evidence to back their calls.
Photo manager
Unit publicist
Head of operations
Access follows the job too: admin, standard, scheduler and read-only levels, and outside collaborators are invited into a single production with an end date, so a freelancer's access closes when the engagement does.
Unreleased schedules are exactly what a studio security review cares about. The essentials are below, and we can supply a full security and data-protection pack for companies that need formal assurance.
UK-hosted and encrypted
AWS London, encrypted in transit and at rest, with encrypted daily backups.
Named accounts with end dates
Outside collaborators get an expiry up front, so access lapses when the engagement does.
AI reads it, it never learns from it
AI pulls the schedule out of your PDF under business terms. Your material never trains a model.
Everything is logged
Logins, permission changes and deletions are recorded, so “who had access?” has an answer.
Early access
We're running it with a small group of productions while we build it out. You get the whole tool and a direct line to the people making it, and what you tell us decides what gets built next.
Bring the schedule you are planning right now and we will set it up with you on a call. From the team behind Image Approvals, trusted on 120+ film and TV productions.
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