Review: Pocket Call Sheet for iPhone/iPad

By Benjamin Craig  |  03-Mar-2011

For a 1st AD or production manager, producing daily call sheets is arguably one of the most critical tasks during any film shoot. Most seasoned professionals will have their favourite desktop apps and methodologies for doing this, and now those who can't be parted from their iOS devices can have their cake and eat it too.

Pocket Call Sheet from Snake Byte Studio is the first native app for iOS devices (that's iPhone and iPAD) which aims to make the creation and distribution of call sheets to cast and crew a breeze. With Pocket Call Sheet you can work with a massive array of information types which would typically find their way onto a call sheet including:

• Project title
• Date
• Day out of days (e.g. "day 3 of a 5 day shoot")
• Location(s) for the day
• Crew contact details
• Scenes to be shot for the day
• Broad schedule
• Call times
• Sunrise/Sunset times
• Makeup and wardrobe times
• Scenes
• Status. i.e. Travel, Work or Holidays
• Weather forecast
• Details of the local hospital, police and fire.
• Property details

And when your call sheets are ready to go, you can email them to your contact lists from directly within the app via your iOS contacts or manually adding recipients.

As a tool for creating call sheets, Pocket Call Sheet certainly has all of the details you'd expect, and having a play with the app it all feels fairly intuitive and well designed. We are left with one burning question however, which is why would you want to spend ages inputting all of this information via a fiddly onscreen keyboard (and a small screen if you're using the iPhone version) when you could achieve the same on a regular desktop using a dedicated call sheet app or even using Microsoft Word and an email program? Perhaps if you needed to pump out your call sheets on the move? But then given that the purpose of a call sheet is to provide the cast and crew with detail ahead this also seems like a stretch. So this brings us back to our opening comment: if you're an avid iOSer who's ditched the notebook for an iPad, then you'll probably love this app; if you’re a seasoned AD or Production Manager who has their templates and system set up, there is little benefit to switching.

Pocket Call Sheet is available from the iTunes App Store, priced $6.99 at the time of writing.

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