Festival production is production math at a different scale — multiple stages, dozens of vendors, and a schedule where one delay can ripple across the entire day. Here’s how I approach it.
Load-In Choreography
Every vendor, from catering trucks to the headline act’s gear, needs a specific window and a specific access point. Overlap those windows without a plan and you get gridlock before the gates even open.
Buffer Time Between Every Act
Changeovers always take longer than anyone estimates. I build real buffer time into every transition — not padding for its own sake, but enough room that one late act doesn’t cascade into a delay for everyone after them.
A Single Source of Truth
At festival scale, everyone needs to be working from the same schedule — talent, vendors, security, and crew. I circulate one master timeline and keep it updated in real time, so no one is ever working from yesterday’s version.
Weather Contingencies
Outdoor, multi-stage events need a real weather protocol — who makes the call, at what point, and what the fallback looks like for each stage. Building that in advance turns a storm from a crisis into a procedure.
Planning something at festival scale? Let’s build the logistics before we build the lineup.