Production Scheduling

Production scheduling in China starts with a calendar that gives no slack. NRTA script pre-approval for any foreign-involved production runs four to twelve weeks before a single permit issues. CFCC co-production sign-off then layers on top. Hard national shutdowns around Chinese New Year (late January or February) and the October 1-7 National Day Golden Week close down cast access, crew bases, and most state-managed locations.

Weather shapes the dates too. Beijing winter pollution windows run October through March, Yangtze and Pearl River basin typhoon seasons run July through September, and high-altitude weather grips the Tibetan Plateau and Inner Mongolian grasslands. These forces shape date choices in ways a plain stripboard cannot foresee. Our first ADs and production managers build schedules in Movie Magic, Gorilla, or StudioBinder. They sequence days at Hengdian World Studios, Qingdao Oriental Movie Metropolis, China Film Group's Huairou lot, and Beijing Film Studio against Shanghai unit moves and provincial location swings, so cast and gear days stay tight.

Our schedules respect the Labor Law of the PRC, including daily hours, required rest periods, social insurance (社保) accounting, and work injury insurance (工伤保险). They also match the real rhythm of Mandarin-language sets, where translator and cultural liaison capacity must be planned alongside DOP and AD calls. We check cast access across the Beijing and Shanghai talent pools against drama and streaming commitments at iQiyi, Tencent Video, and Youku, and against any actor's Lunar New Year homecoming plans.

The on-the-ground picture gets even more precise. We layer in CAAC drone permit windows, sensitive-area exclusions across Tibet, Xinjiang, and military zones, and weather spares for Hainan tropical coast shoots and Harbin snow-country units. Daily revisions, stripboard updates, and one-liner reissues run inside a twenty-four-hour turn. So when scenes shift, and on a Chinese schedule they always shift, the AD department and the heads of department all work from a single, defensible source of truth.