GUIDE
What a run of show is, and how to build one that holds up
A run of show is the minute by minute plan for what happens during an event, in the order it happens, with a time against every item and a name against every item. It is the document the show gets called from.
It is not the production schedule. The production schedule covers the days around the event: when the trucks arrive, when the stage goes up, when the crew breaks for lunch, when the room is struck. The run of show covers the hours the audience is in the room, or the hours the camera is recording, and it runs at the level of individual cues rather than tasks.
The people who need to know exactly what happens next are reading the run of show.
What belongs in one
Times, and which of them are fixed. Every item needs a start and a duration. A few of them are fixed by something outside your control: doors, a dinner service the kitchen has committed to, a satellite window, a union break, a curfew. Everything else floats around those.
Cue numbers. Number every item, and leave gaps. When something is added at rehearsal, it goes in as 14.5 and nobody has to reprint.
An owner for every line. Not a department, a person. “AV” is not an owner. The name of the person on headset who does the thing is an owner.
The cue itself, in plain words. “Lights to preset 4, VT rolls, host crosses to podium” is a cue. “Welcome” is not.
The channel. If you are running comms, say which channel each cue lives on. Production on 1, lighting on 2, talent escorts on 3, whatever your plan is, but put it on the page.
Talent movements. Who is on, when they are on, where they are standing before they are on, and who is walking them there. A person who arrives at the wings at the moment they are meant to be on stage arrives late.
Media and assets. Which file plays, where it lives, who is rolling it. The presentation that “will be sent over” is the single most common reason a show stops.
The build order that works
Build it backwards from the fixed points, not forwards from load in.
1. Write down the moments that cannot move. Doors, dinner, the award announcement the client has already put in a press release, the end time you promised the venue. These are your anchors.
2. Fill in the content between them. Ask each content owner how long their piece is, then write down what they said. You will adjust it, but start from their number so the conversation later is about their number.
3. Add the mechanical time nobody budgets for. A speaker walking from a table to the stage can easily eat forty seconds. A podium change is a minute. A band changeover is five to fifteen. A video that has to be found on a laptop is longer than anyone admits. Programs overrun in these gaps, not in the content.
4. Put the buffer where you can spend it. Ten minutes hidden in one place is useless. Two minutes across five places gives you somewhere to give time back.
5. Read it out loud against a clock. Not silently. Out loud, in real time, with a stopwatch. You will find the missing minute.
How to keep it correct when things change
Things always change. The keynote gets longer, the sponsor gets added, the award order changes because someone important cannot stay.
The failure mode is not the change. It is that changing one line means retyping every time below it, so the version on the printer, the version on the client’s phone and the version on the caller’s screen stop agreeing with each other.
Two habits fix that.
Make the timing calculate. If your run of show is a table of typed times, one change costs you twenty minutes and a mistake. If the times are driven by the durations, one change costs you one cell.
Version it out loud. Every version gets a version number and a time on it, and you say the version number when you send it. “Run of show v4, 16:20” is a sentence people can check against the paper in their hand.
Calling from it
The document you build in the office and the document you call from are the same document, but on the day you use it differently.
Log the real time each cue actually happened. Not because anyone will read it afterwards, though a client debrief is easier with it, but because the gap between the planned time and the real time is the only honest answer to “are we running late”. Three minutes behind at cue 4 is nothing. Three minutes behind at cue 4 and nine minutes behind at cue 9 is a program that will not end when you promised, and you have an hour to do something about it rather than five minutes.
The mistakes that cost the most
One document doing two jobs. A run of show that also tries to be the production schedule ends up too long to call from. Keep the build day somewhere else.
No end time. If the document does not state when the program ends, nobody notices it drifting until the venue does.
A hard time that is not actually possible. Two fixed times with more content between them than the gap allows. It is arithmetic, and it is worth checking before show day rather than discovering it live.
Nobody owning the transitions. Cues are owned. The seconds between cues are usually not, and that is where shows fall apart.
A working template
Everything above is what the Run of Show template in this shop was built to do. It is an Excel workbook where durations drive the schedule, hard times re-anchor it, cue by cue variance shows how you are running while you call it, and a calculated check tells you whether the program still ends when you promised and which cues are missing an owner, a duration or a channel.
It is $18 and it comes with a complete worked awards dinner already in the file, so you can see how the pieces connect before you type over it.
Get the Run of Show Template on Etsy, $18