Run Sheets and Signal Flow Notes to Prepare Before Winter Shows

Mid autumn is when many studios and event teams catch their breath. The summer festivals are packed away, and the busy run of winter broadcasts, corporate evenings and seasonal concerts has not yet begun. I am a lighting designer rather than a planner by trade, yet the shows that go smoothly in December are almost always the ones where somebody sat down in October and wrote things out properly.

Workflow planning is the part of our work that produces paper: written run sheets, signal flow diagrams and handover notes. None of it is glamorous, but it is what lets video, audio and lighting teams work from one plan instead of three private ones. The quiet weeks are the right time to draft it, because nobody is waiting on a camera shot or a sound check while you do.

If you leave the writing until the week of the show, it gets squeezed between rigging and rehearsal, and the first things to go are the details that matter most: who calls the cues, who owns each cable run, and what happens when something drops out.

A run sheet is a timed list of what happens in a show, in the order it happens. The useful ones are plain. Each line carries a time, a cue or action, the department responsible and a short note. I like to keep one line to one event, so that a stage manager glancing at it under dim light can find their place in a second.

Write it in the language the crew actually uses. If the camera operators call a shot the wide, do not call it the establishing frame on paper. A run sheet that reads like a formal document gets ignored, while one that matches how people talk gets pinned to the desk and marked up in pencil.

Leave room for change. Autumn and winter schedules shift as speakers are added, running orders are reshuffled and venues change their access times. Number your versions clearly and put the date of the revision at the top, so nobody works from an older copy without knowing it.

• Time, cue, department and a short note on every line
• Use the crew's own words for shots and cues
• Number each revision and mark the version at the top

A signal flow diagram shows where each picture, sound and control signal starts, where it passes through and where it ends. It does not need to be a work of art. Boxes for sources, boxes for switchers, mixers and processors, and lines between them, labelled with what travels along each one, will do.

The value is in the questions it forces. Where does the clean feed leave the vision mixer? Which desk sends audio to the broadcast truck and which sends it to the room? Who owns the point where two systems meet? Gaps and doubled paths show up on paper far more cheaply than they do during a sound check.

Winter work often means unfamiliar rooms, with colder loading bays and shorter set-up windows. A diagram that has already been checked means your crew spends the allotted hours connecting and testing rather than puzzling over what plugs into what. Print it at a readable size and keep a copy at each department's position.

Handover notes are the short document that says what was done, what state things were left in and what the next person should know. They matter whenever a show changes hands: a day crew passing to an evening crew, a studio team leaving a rig for the next booking, or a designer handing a plot to the operator who will run it.

I write mine as if the reader has never seen the room. I note where the lighting plot differs from the first draft, which fixtures were moved after focusing, and what the console is programmed to do at each cue. A page and a half is usually enough.

The same habit helps across seasons. When the spring schedule begins, you will be glad of a note that says how a studio was set up in autumn, rather than relying on anyone's memory of a rig they last touched months before. Notes written while the details are fresh are always better than notes reconstructed afterwards.

• What was changed from the agreed plan
• What state each system was left in
• Who to ask about anything unclear

Documents without an owner drift. Before the first draft goes out, decide who holds the master copy of the run sheet and who is allowed to change it. On smaller productions this is usually the producer or stage manager. What matters is that the answer is one name, not a committee.

Share changes in one place and at set times. A tidy habit is a short end-of-day message listing what changed in the plan, so heads of department update their own copies together. Lighting does not then discover at the last minute that a segment was cut, and sound does not prepare for a speaker who has withdrawn.

Colder months also bring more absences through illness and travel disruption. If your plan lives only in one person's head or one person's inbox, an unexpected day off can stall a whole rehearsal. Written, shared and clearly owned documents let someone step in without starting from nothing.

If you have a studio booking or live event in the next few months, you can begin this week without special software. A word processor and a drawing tool are enough. Start with the show you know best, because writing down a familiar process is easier than designing a new one.

Draft the run sheet first, then the signal flow, then a blank handover template you can reuse. Ask each head of department to read their own part and mark anything that does not match how they work. Fifteen minutes of their comments will improve the documents more than another hour of your own editing.

Then put the finished set where everybody can find it, and bring printed copies to load-in. Screens fail and batteries run flat in cold venues, whereas a folded sheet in a jacket pocket is still there at the end of the night.

• Draft the run sheet from a show you know well
• Check the signal flow with each department
• Keep a reusable blank handover template
• Print copies for load-in