Building your crew

Filling a production happens in three steps: define the roles, find people, and agree terms.

Add the positions you need

In the project's Crew tab, add a position for each role you need to fill — a department and job title (for example, Camera → Focus Puller). Positions are what you hire against, and they also organise your approval chain.

Search for crew

Open a position and search CrewShift's crew. Results are matched on department, job title and location, and show each person's availability and their suggested day rate. Availability is checked against your shooting days' call and wrap times once your schedule has them; without a schedule or times, CrewShift compares whole days. Booked means another commitment overlaps your hours, Partly booked means they work elsewhere that day but outside your hours, and Optioned means someone else already has an open offer with them for those dates. For booked and partly booked people the busy times are shown. None of these block an invite — they are there to help you judge. You can also invite someone who isn't on CrewShift yet by email — see inviting someone new for what happens next and how to resend.

Send an offer

Pick a person and either propose a rate or send a rate request (asking them to name their price). This opens a negotiation — a back-and-forth of offers until you both agree. When an offer is accepted, you send a deal memo to lock it in.

What "filled" means

A position counts as filled once the crew member has countersigned the deal memo — that's the point the engagement becomes binding and the position's cost enters your committed budget. Between an accepted offer and the countersignature, the position shows as optioned: the crew member has agreed and you've sent the memo, but it isn't locked in yet. The Crew tab and the Finances summary both count only countersigned positions as filled — an optioned position appears separately as "awaiting signature" until it's signed, and a position with an offer out but not yet accepted shows separately again, as "in negotiation".

Collaborators & co-producers

You can add collaborators to a project — for example a co-producer or line producer — and give them rights to help manage crew, approvals and pay.