What First Grave On The Right Actually Is
It is a scheduling methodology for film and television production, created by David G. Lewis around 1995. The basic premise is straightforward: when you are building a shooting schedule, you group all scenes that involve the same set of actors together regardless of where they appear in the script, then schedule those blocks consecutively. The name comes from the way you visualize it — you read through the script and anything involving your main cast becomes a "grave" you dig out on the right side of your schedule. I learned about this method when I was second unit coordinating a low-budget indie feature back in 2003. Our line producer threw together a schedule using traditional day-and-night pages, and we burned through three days of principal photography before realizing we had split the lead actor's appearances across non-consecutive days with different wardrobe changes and makeup requirements in between. That cost us extra money and a lot of frustration on set.
How To Apply First Grave On The Right On Your Next Production
Start by printing out your script. Take a highlighter and mark every page where your A-cast appears. Not B-cast, not extras — just the people you paid above-the-line rates for. Then go back and mark every scene by location. Cross-reference the two. Here is what most people mess up: they try to group by location first, then by cast. That is backwards for this method. Cast first, always. The logic is that actor availability and daily rates are usually your biggest expense, not the cost of striking and resetting a single set. Moving an actor from location A to location B and back again because you prioritized location grouping will blow your budget faster than anything else. Once you have your cast highlighted, start pulling their scenes together into contiguous blocks. If actor A appears on pages 12, 34, and 67 of the script, and actor B appears on pages 12 and 34, those shared scenes go on the same shoot day. Page 67 has to be scheduled with whoever else is in that scene, even if it means breaking up a location block.
I ran into a specific problem on a commercial shoot last year where a lead performer was contracted for a minimum call time that couldn't be moved, but their only other scene was on page 89 — deep into the script, surrounded by heavy VFX plates and a completely different crew configuration. Pushing that scene earlier would have required rearranging six other shoot days and losing a location permit we had already paid for. What I ended up doing was scheduling the page 89 scene on its own half-day after the main shoot wrapped, bringing in just the key department heads and the performer. It cost us an additional half-day rate but saved us from paying location holdover fees on three full days. That is the kind of tradeoff this method forces you to make constantly. The grouping process works best when you use scheduling software that allows you to toggle between script order and grouped order simultaneously. Tools like Movie Magic Scheduling, StudioBuddy, and even spreadsheets with conditional formatting can handle this. The key is seeing both views at once so you can spot conflicts before they become problems.
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Where This Method Falls Apart
First Grave On The Right is not a universal solution. It breaks down in a few specific scenarios that beginners rarely anticipate. If your production has heavy weather-dependent exterior scenes, grouping by cast can force you to shoot five interior days in a row while the one exterior day with your lead gets pushed to the end of the schedule. If the weather window closes, you have a major problem. In these cases, a hybrid approach where you lock weather-sensitive days first and then apply the grouping method to the remaining pages works better. Another limitation: Union productions with strict turnaround requirements between calls can make pure cast-grouping impossible. If you have two scenes back-to-back with the same actor but the makeup and costume change between them pushes you over the mandated rest period, you cannot simply schedule them consecutively. You need to understand your union agreements inside out before committing to this method.
There is also a counter-intuitive point that rarely gets discussed. Grouping by cast sounds like it always saves money, but in practice it can increase per-day costs significantly. When you bunch all of your lead actor's scenes together, you might need to bring on additional crew members for specialized scenes that don't otherwise need them. A dialogue-heavy scene might only require a camera operator and a gaffer, but if you schedule it between two action sequences that need a full rig, you are paying for that full rig on a day that only needs the basics. The total savings on actor days may be partially offset by inflated crew days. For smaller productions with minimal cast and simple locations, the overhead of creating a First Grave On The Right schedule often exceeds the time savings it provides. I would not recommend spending more than a day or two building this schedule unless you are working with eight or more speaking roles and multiple locations. A straightforward page-by-page schedule using traditional methods will often get you 90 percent of the benefit with 20 percent of the effort. The method also assumes your script is reasonably locked. If you are in pre-production and pages are still being rewritten, the grouping you build today may be completely obsolete in a week. I have seen productions waste entire weekends reworking schedules that were based on draft pages, only to discard them when the final draft arrived. Build your First Grave On The Right schedule on the latest locked version of the script, not an early draft.
One more thing worth noting: this method was designed for feature films and television with substantial below-the-line departments. It does not translate well to micro-budget productions or single-camera documentaries where the "cast" might be three people and the locations change daily. In those cases, traditional chronological scheduling or location-based scheduling tends to be more practical. The framework simply adds unnecessary complexity when your variables are limited. If you want to learn more about the original methodology, David G. Lewis published his approach in several industry trade publications in the late 1990s and early 2000s. His core papers can be found through the International Union of Stage Employees archives and various film production textbooks. There is no single official download link, since this is a scheduling philosophy rather than a piece of software, but many production managers build their own templates based on his published worksheets.
