Crew depth in Texas by department, and where it thins out.

Actor Dean Stanfield watched playback on a mobile monitor while filming in downtown Austin, TX on "Odie" a feature film by Nick Barr

Every state's film office says the same sentence about its crew: world-class, deep, experienced. It's never false and it's never useful, because the question a line producer is asking is not whether the crew base is good. It's which departments they'll have to import, so they can budget the flights before the flights are a surprise.

Here is my answer for Texas, by department. The finding first, then the map, then the method, which is not a survey and doesn't pretend to be. Disagree with it; that's what it's for.

The finding.

Camera and locations are deep. Costume, you import. Production office and accounting, assistant directors, and post are thin, and of the three, the production office is the one that hurts most, because locals in that room touch every other department on the show. Everything else is adequate, which means you'll staff it in Texas and you'll make a call or two to do it.

The map.

Four ratings: deep, adequate, thin, import. What each one means is spelled out under the method at the bottom, and the short version is how many calls out of state I'd expect to make.

• Camera: deep. Operators, ACs, DITs, in both Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth. The department I'd staff in Texas without a second thought.

• Locations: deep. Managers and scouts who know the cities, the counties and, more usefully, the property owners. This is the department that makes the locations post possible.

• Grip and electric: adequate. Good keys, real depth behind them in the two production centers, thinner outside them.

• Art, construction and set decoration: adequate. Designers and set decorators are here; construction crews at scale are where a second show starts to compete with the first.

• Hair and makeup: adequate. Enough for a feature. Specialty work is a conversation.

• Sound: adequate. Mixers and boom operators are here; the bench is short.

• Transportation: adequate. Drivers and coordinators, yes. Picture cars and specialty vehicles, a call.

• Stunts: adequate. Coordinators and performers exist and the good ones are booked.

• Special effects: adequate. Practical effects supervisors are here; big rigs come with their own crews.

• VFX on set: adequate. Supervisors and data wranglers, enough for a feature.

• Production office and accounting: thin. Coordinators, office PAs, payroll-literate accountants who've done a Texas file. This is the one to fix first, and I'll say why below.

• Assistant directors: thin. Seconds and second-seconds especially. Firsts with feature credits are here and spoken for.

• Post, picture and sound: thin. Good editors and mixers exist. A full finish with theatrical QC is a shorter list than the city's reputation suggests, and I say that having just been through it on my own film.

• Costume: import it. Designers with feature credits and the workroom behind them are not here in the numbers a show needs. Plan on it.

• Equipment and production services: adequate. The rental and services houses of the kind you'd call in Los Angeles have Texas outposts or Texas equivalents. Not the same depth of inventory; the same phone call.

An Austin crew at work on Odie.

Why the production office is the one that matters.

Locals in the production office help more than almost any other department combined, because they impact every department. A coordinator who knows which vendor answers on a Saturday, which permit office to walk into instead of email, and which crew list is real, saves every other department a day a week. An imported production office spends its first three weeks learning what a local one already knew. And in Texas specifically, the office is where the residency declarations, the paid-versus-unpaid lists and the call-sheet archive live, which is to say the office is where the grant lives. Staff it locally first. Import the costume designer instead.

What the residency math does to this.

The Texas grant requires 35% of paid crew to be Texas residents, counted by head count, per the Commission's page as of September 4, 2026, stepping to 40% for projects that begin principal photography on or after September 1, 2027, per the statute. That number is carried by the deep departments. Camera, locations, grip and electric and the production office are where the Texas heads come from, and they're plentiful enough that a show which staffs them locally on purpose can import costume and a couple of ADs and still clear the test comfortably. A show that imports camera because the DP brought her own team is a show fighting for its percentage in every other department. Hire the deep ones local, first, and treat the thin ones as the flights you were going to pay for anyway.

The Odie crew between setups on an Austin street.

The method, so you can disagree.

This is one producer's map, from my own shows in Texas and the hiring calls I've made for them, not a survey. I didn't call department heads across the state to build it, and I want to be clear about that, because the difference between a map and a survey is the difference between an opinion you can argue with and a study you can cite. The directories exist: the Texas Film Commission's production directory lists crew by category, and the Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio film offices each run a searchable crew database. I could not pull category counts from them for this post. If you can, and they contradict me, I'd like to know.

What a rating means: deep, I'd staff it here without a call out of state. Adequate, I'd staff it here and expect a call or two. Thin, I'd expect to import part of it. Import, I wouldn't plan on Texas for it. That's the whole methodology, and it's more than the sentence "world-class crew base" comes with.

What to do with it.

Budget the costume flights now. Staff the production office locally before you staff anything else, and give that office the Texas file on day one. Hire camera and locations here without a second thought. Assume one call per adequate department and two per thin one, and assume the good people in the thin departments may already be on a Sheridan show. Then send me the departments where you think I'm wrong, because the next version of this map should be better than this one, and the only way it gets there is other people's hiring calls.

If you want the person who makes those calls, that's the producer of record job, and the producers page says what it costs to ask. Crew bills at standard guild rates and we don't mark up labor; that's the position and it's not changing.