Project receives funding approval—budget released, shoot date locked. Green light signals all departments to move into full production.
The moment a project actually gets underway—not in development, not in planning, but as a real production with a full budget and a fixed shooting schedule. That is greenlit. Once this decision is made, the line producer can hire the crew, locations are booked, and the production designer orders materials. It's the point where abstract commitments become concrete financial flows and binding contracts. Everything that came before—treatments, budgets, script revisions—was prologue. Now it's about real cohesion between financing and execution.
Practically speaking, as a cinematographer, you usually receive this information via the producer or production management: "The project is now greenlit." This means specifically: your daily rate is guaranteed, the shooting schedule is watertight, and the equipment can finally be ordered. Before this, there's always a certain state of limbo—options are held, but not booked. Many projects fail between development and greenlighting; the budget isn't released, financing partners pull out, or studio management says no. Then all your preparation time was in vain.
Greenlighting is also the point where the tone in the production team changes. Beforehand, there's still room for radical redesigns—perhaps the camera setup is completely changed, the DP is swapped out, or the location budget is reduced. After greenlighting, these decisions are expensive. It's now about execution, not creation. Therefore, the influence of individual departments becomes significantly smaller afterward. The DP can no longer say: "I need an extra 500k for lighting equipment." The budget is locked, and the rules of the game are set.
In practice, many productions experience the phenomenon of being half greenlit—some financing is confirmed, but not all of it. This is an unstable state. You can start, but you can't plan fully. This means the crew is hired on call, and equipment is only held in rolling reserve. Only when one hundred percent of the financing is secured does it truly count as greenlit. And that makes the difference between a project that starts and one that collapses mid-production.