A Cue Sheet That Finally Worked: Tessa's First Panel Night

Tessa joined the course in early autumn. She worked as an events assistant for a regional business group and had just been handed her first evening panel to coordinate. Her cue sheet was a single dense page: every row in the same font, every instruction written as a sentence, and the times buried in the middle of each line. In the planning room it made sense to her, because she had written it. She brought it to our cue sheet session because, in her words, the sound technician had stopped looking at it halfway through the last rehearsal.

I asked her to read a few lines aloud as if she were the camera operator. By the third row she was squinting and losing her place. That small exercise did more than any explanation from me. The sheet was accurate, but it was written for the person who made it, not for someone glancing down for half a second between moves. We agreed that this would be the thing to fix before anything else.

Before touching the layout, Tessa asked each person who would use the sheet one question: what do you need to know, and when? The answers were short and different. The sound technician wanted to know which microphone went live and who spoke next. The camera operator wanted the shot change and a warning one segment ahead. The presenter wanted her own entry line and the time left in the segment, nothing more.

This is the core idea behind a readable cue sheet. One page cannot carry everything, so it carries what each reader acts on. Tessa realised she had been recording what happened rather than what someone had to do. Once she separated the two, the rows shrank, the columns got clearer, and a lot of her original text turned out to belong in the production notes instead.

• Sound: microphone on and off, music or playback, next voice
• Camera: shot change, graphics, one-segment warning
• Presenter: entry line, time left, handover to the next speaker

Her second version used a fixed column order: time, segment number, action, owner. Every row started with the time in the same place, so the eye could find it without reading. Actions were written as short commands, starting with a verb, such as bring up mic two or cut to wide. Anything that needed a longer explanation got a marker pointing to a note elsewhere.

She also introduced a plain visual rule: a thicker line between segments, and a short shaded row where a handover happened between two people. Nothing decorative, only enough to let a reader find their place again after looking away at the stage. When she printed it, the page used less text than before yet carried more of what the team had asked for.

• Fixed columns: time, segment, action, owner
• Verb-first wording, one action per row
• Thicker line between segments, shaded row for handovers

The new sheet went into a walkthrough the week before the panel. Within ten minutes it showed two problems the old version had hidden. A guest introduction had no owner, so the presenter and the moderator both waited for the other. And a video clip cue sat directly after a microphone change, leaving the sound technician only a few seconds to do both.

Neither gap was a surprise to Tessa once she saw it, which is exactly the value of a clean sheet: gaps become visible. She moved the clip one row later, added a short buffer, and gave the introduction to the moderator in writing. The second walkthrough ran without anyone stopping to ask what came next.

Tessa told me afterwards that the evening felt oddly quiet from where she stood. People looked at the sheet, did their part and looked up again. The panel ran a little long in the middle segment, and because each row carried its own time and owner, she could point to the one buffer row and shorten the closing remarks instead of rushing everything.

She did not claim it was flawless. A microphone was switched on a beat early in the second half, and the sheet gave her a quick way to see whose row it was and talk it through calmly afterwards. That, she said, was the real change: problems became things to look up and discuss, rather than things to argue about from memory.

Tessa now starts every programme by listing who reads the sheet and what each of them acts on, before she writes a single row. She keeps the column order fixed from show to show, so crews who work with her more than once know where to look. And she holds back anything long-winded for the production notes, where it can be read in a calm moment rather than under lights.

If you are building your first cue sheet, her habits are a fair place to begin. Print it, hold it at arm's length, and read three rows aloud as someone who has half a second to spare. If you lose your place, the crew will too, and the fix is usually fewer words, not more.