Itinerama

Before you head to a location with the entire crew and equipment, you need a reliable visual roadmap — and that's exactly what an Itinerama provides. It's not just a shooting schedule with times; it's a graphic-narrative outline of the sequence, fixing locations, camera positions, and lighting concepts in chronological order. The DoP sketches or visualizes how the sun moves, where reflectors need to be placed, and which angles are realistic for each scene — all summarized on one sheet or in a series of sketches.

Practical Benefit on Set: The Itinerama prevents you from realizing on location that the afternoon sun is shining in exactly the wrong direction or that two planned camera positions are physically impossible. Assistant camera and gaffers can start working in their positions while the director and actors are still rehearsing blocking. It saves you two to four hours of setup stress daily — the time you would otherwise spend improvising solutions that could have been foreseen. It's invaluable, especially on shooting days with tight time windows (sunrise or sunset, city closures).

Format and Content: It can be hand-drawn — a 1:500 floor plan with marked camera positions, lighting setups, and movement paths — or digital as a sequence of photos with planned camera positions drawn on them (often using smartphone AR or simple pen markings). Some teams also use stop-motion models or 360 photos of the location with vectors drawn on them. What's important is: it must be created before the shooting day, and all relevant departments — direction, camera, lighting, production design — must see the same version.

Limitations and Reality: No Itinerama survives its first encounter with real sun, wind, and actor improvisation unchanged. It's a working basis, not a dogmatic law — but one on which you can react quickly. An Itinerama you ignore won't harm you; one you don't have and need will cost you precious hours day after day. The best preparation is the one that saves time on set.