Production Scheduling

Production scheduling in China starts with a calendar that is genuinely unforgiving. NRTA script pre-approval for any foreign-involved production runs four to twelve weeks before a single permit is issued, CFCC co-production sign-off layers on top of that, and the hard national shutdowns around Chinese New Year (late January or February) and the October 1-7 National Day Golden Week effectively close down cast access, crew bases and most state-managed locations.

Here is how this works in practice. Beijing winter pollution windows from October through March, Yangtze and Pearl River basin typhoon seasons from July through September, and the high-altitude weather on the Tibetan Plateau and in Inner Mongolian grasslands all push date selection in ways a generic stripboard cannot anticipate. Our first ADs and production managers build schedules in Movie Magic, Gorilla or StudioBinder, sequencing 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 are kept tight.

We design schedules that respect both the Labor Law of the PRC — daily hours, mandatory rest periods, social insurance (社保) accounting, work injury insurance (工伤保险). And the practical rhythm of Mandarin-language sets where translator and cultural liaison capacity has to be planned alongside DOP and AD calls. Cast access across the Beijing and Shanghai talent pools is checked against drama and streaming series commitments at iQiyi, Tencent Video and Youku, and against any actor's Lunar New Year homecoming obligations.

The picture on the ground is more specific. We layer in CAAC drone permit windows, sensitive-area exclusions across Tibet, Xinjiang and military zones, and weather contingencies 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 are working from a single, defensible source of truth.