Craft Services & Meal Periods

Overview

Align the scope of the project with your resources – food is the primary hard cost of student filmmaking.

Filmmaking is hard work, especially when laboring for little to no pay. Remember that the scale of a production’s cast and crew is a byproduct of choices made in the development and pre-production phases of the project. Be mindful of the impact to your production’s potential budget when developing a project.

If feeding the crew a proper meal is too expensive, simplifying the scope of the production instead of just underserving your team. If the production needs less crew, it has to feed less crew.

Productions that do not have adequate budget to provide complete meals should limit themselves to 5 crew members and 5-hour workdays.

Craft Services

Sanctioned student productions are required to provide craft services for their cast and crew on workdays that take place for 3 hours or more. This includes essentials like chilled water and drinks with electrolytes along with a vareity of savoy and sugary snacks. Easily available food items on set significantly help to reduce the risks of overheating, dehydration, and fainting caused by low blood sugar from occuring.

Student producers and unit production managers who do not supply student crews with essential craft services during production can face disciplinary action.

Meal Periods

Student productions are required to break for a 30-minute Meal Period every 6 hours. The break officially starts when the last crew member is through the catering line, so be sure to have food ready for an orderly call to lunch.

During the meal period, productions are expected to provide a complete meal to their cast and crew. Serving just trays of pasta or rice is not considered a complete meal. There should be proteins, vegetables, and starches with more than one serving available if desired. Meals should be hot at the time of serving. Pizza is an acceptable as a second meal option, but should not be served during the frist meal period.

Student productions are expected to take into consideration any reasonable dietary needs of cast and crew members into account (e.g., vegans, vegetarians, gluten free and other allergies).

A “walking lunch” or “walking meal,” expecting cast and crew to skip their meal period and eat while working, are not permitted.

Second Meals

Second meals must be provided in the event a production works a total of 12 hours. This must be provide in the form of a walkaway meal or a meal comp as production can not conitnue once the 12-hour max is reached. See the Shooting Schedule article for more details regarding maxium workday limits.