From Blank Page to Run Sheet: How We Plan a Festival Broadcast
A look at how a live event workflow takes shape in practice: the questions we ask first, how signal flow diagrams are drawn, and how crew schedules are built and revised.
7 minutes to read
Starting with questions, not equipment
Every workflow plan I help with begins with a conversation rather than a kit list. Before anyone mentions cameras or desks, we ask what the audience will actually see and hear, who is responsible for each part of it, and what happens if something stops working halfway through a set. In these mid autumn weeks, with indoor venues and one-off broadcast events filling the diary, the answers vary enormously, but the questions stay the same.
Producers often arrive with a clear picture of the show and only a loose picture of the technical chain behind it. That is normal. Our job at this stage is to listen, write down every assumption, and mark the ones that nobody has checked yet. A venue's power supply, the distance between stage and control room, and the number of people who need talkback are the sort of details that quietly shape everything later.
By the end of the first conversation we usually have a single page of notes: the running time, the sources, the destinations, the people. It looks unimpressive. It is also the foundation that the run sheet, the diagrams and the schedule will all be built from, so we keep it short and keep it honest.
- What must the audience see and hear, and when
- Who owns each source and each destination
- What is the fallback if a link or a desk fails
- What does the venue already provide
Building the run sheet line by line
The run sheet is the document everyone ends up holding, so it has to be readable at a glance in poor light. We draft it as a simple table: a timing, an event, the technical cue that goes with it, and the person who calls or confirms it. Anything that needs a paragraph of explanation gets moved to a note rather than crammed into a cell.
I write the audio lines myself, because sound cues are where run sheets most often go vague. A line that says 'band on' is not enough for an engineer. It needs to say which stage inputs are live, which monitor mixes change, and whether the broadcast feed takes a separate mix. Spelling this out on paper catches disagreements while they are still cheap to settle.
We keep the first draft deliberately rough and circulate it early. Stage managers, camera operators and lighting colleagues mark it up, and their corrections are almost always about changeovers and gaps, the minutes between acts that look empty on a schedule and turn out to be the busiest part of the day.
Drawing the signal flow diagram
A signal flow diagram answers one question: where does each signal start, what does it pass through, and where does it end up. We draw it left to right, sources on the left, destinations on the right, with every cable run, converter and splitter shown as its own box. If a path cannot be traced with a finger from one side to the other, the diagram is not finished.
Callum and I usually draw separate layers first, video and audio, then merge them onto one sheet only where they genuinely meet, such as embedded audio on a camera feed. Colour helps, but we always make sure the diagram still reads when printed in black and white, because that is how it tends to be pinned to a wall.
Labelling matters more than neatness. Each connection carries the same name on the diagram, on the patch panel and on the run sheet, so that a crew member shouting a name across a cold stage and a producer reading the page are talking about the same thing.
- Sources left, destinations right
- Every box named exactly as it is labelled on site
- Separate layers for audio and video, merged only where needed
Turning the plan into a crew schedule
With the sheet and diagram agreed, we work out who needs to be where, and when. A crew schedule is less about listing names than about spotting clashes: the one person who is meant to be rigging a camera position and testing talkback at the same hour, or two teams needing the same corner of the stage for load-in.
We build the schedule backwards from the first public moment, whether that is doors or the start of transmission. Each task is given a start, a duration and a person, and then we add the dull parts that people forget: breaks, travel between areas, waiting for access. A schedule without meals in it tends to collapse by mid afternoon.
Where a crew is small, we say plainly which tasks cannot happen at the same time and suggest what to drop or move. It is a more useful conversation to have a week before the event than at six in the morning on the day, when everybody is already tired and the van is half unloaded.
What changes once the day arrives
No plan survives contact with a real venue unchanged, and we would be wary of any that claimed to. A cable run turns out longer than measured, a performer wants a different monitor position, or the weather pushes the schedule. What the paperwork gives you is not perfection but a shared reference to change from.
On the day we carry printed copies of the current version and a pen. Changes are written on the sheet, initialled, and passed to whoever calls the show, so that nobody is working from a version that is an hour out of date. Afterwards, those marked-up pages are the most useful thing we bring home.
I have learnt to treat a late change as a prompt to re-check the chain, not just patch the one item. If a stage plot moves, the monitor mixes, the camera positions and the cable lengths all deserve a second look, even when everyone is eager to get on.
- Printed, dated versions only
- Every change initialled and passed to the caller
- Marked-up copies kept for the next event
Keeping the paperwork useful afterwards
Once an event is over, we sit down with the marked-up run sheet and ask which lines were wrong, which were missing and which nobody used. Those answers shape the template for the next job far more than any theory does. Over the years, our own templates have become shorter, not longer, as we have removed what crews ignored.
We also tidy the signal flow diagram to reflect what was really built, not what was planned. A drawing that matches the final rig is valuable if the same event returns the following year, or if another crew has to take over the system without us in the room.
None of this is glamorous work. It sits behind the lights and the sound and the picture, and the audience never sees it. But when a festival broadcast runs without a long silence or a missed cue, it is almost always because someone spent a few quiet hours with a pen and a blank page.
Good workflow planning is mostly patient, ordinary work: asking plain questions, writing things down clearly, and leaving room for the day to change. A run sheet, a signal flow diagram and a crew schedule will not make an event easy, but they let a team make decisions calmly when something shifts. If you have an event coming up and want to talk it through, our contact page is the place to start.
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