Script Revisions and Coloured Pages: How Production Drafts Work

Why coloured pages exist

Once a production starts prepping, the script stops being a document and becomes infrastructure. The breakdown, the schedule, the budget, every department's prep list and every call sheet all reference it by scene number and page.

So you can't just issue a new draft. If you did, every one of those documents would need rebuilding, and half the crew would be working from a version that no longer matches.

The coloured page system solves this. Instead of reissuing the whole script, you reissue only the pages that changed, printed on a new colour. Anyone can see at a glance whether they're holding current pages.

The colour order

The standard progression:

1. White — the production draft, issued at lock
2. Blue
3. Pink
4. Yellow
5. Green
6. Goldenrod
7. Buff
8. Salmon
9. Cherry

After cherry, productions cycle back to "double white," "double blue" and so on. Long-running television gets there more often than you'd think.

The order is close to universal, though a few regions and studios vary the tail end. What matters is that everyone on a given production uses the same order.

Locking the script

At a certain point — usually when prep is far enough along that documents depend on it — the script is locked.

Locking freezes two things: page numbers and scene numbers. From that moment they never change, no matter what happens to the content.

This is the part that surprises people. If you add a page of material after page 12, you don't renumber everything after it. You create page 12A. Add more, and you get 12B. Delete a page and it becomes an omitted page rather than disappearing.

Same with scenes. Insert a scene between 14 and 15 and it becomes scene 14A. Cut scene 22 and the script says "22 OMITTED" — the number is never reused and never reassigned.

Why renumbering breaks everything

This is worth being blunt about, because it's the single most expensive script-management mistake:

If you renumber scenes after lock, every downstream document becomes wrong simultaneously.

• The breakdown references scenes by number
• Every strip on the stripboard carries a scene number
• The Day Out of Days derives from those strips
• Every call sheet lists scene numbers
• Every department's prep list is organised by scene
• Camera reports and continuity notes reference scene and slate

Renumbering doesn't invalidate one document. It invalidates all of them at once, and there's no automated way back. This is why A-pages and omitted scenes exist — they're ugly, and they're much cheaper than the alternative.

Revision marks

Changed lines are marked with an asterisk in the right margin. The revision colour and date go in the header.

That's all the information a crew member needs: what colour am I holding, and which specific lines changed. They don't re-read the page; they read the asterisked lines.

What actually gets distributed

When a revision issues, crew receive:

• The changed pages, on the new colour
• A revision summary noting what changed and why, in plain language
• Updated sides for any affected shoot day

Not everyone needs everything. An actor needs their scenes. The art department needs scenes affecting their elements. Distributing the full script on every revision is how people stop reading revisions.

Sides

Sides are the pages being shot on a given day, reduced and issued to cast and crew for that day only. Usually half-size, so they fit in a pocket.

Sides come from the current revision. If a scene changed on pink pages and you're shooting it tomorrow, the sides must be pink pages — not the white draft, not the blue.

This sounds obvious and is a common failure, because sides are often generated once and reused.

Doing this without paper

The colour system is a solution to a printing problem, and most productions still print. But the underlying requirement — everyone knows whether they have current material — is better solved digitally.

In ScenePaper's Writers' Room, revisions carry their colour, changed lines are marked, and sides generate from the current revision for a given shoot day. Scene numbers lock, and inserts become A-scenes automatically rather than by discipline.

The result is the same convention, minus the risk that somebody's holding yellow pages in a pink world.

The short version

• Lock the script when prep starts depending on it
• Never renumber pages or scenes after lock — use A-pages and omitted scenes
• Issue only changed pages, on the next colour
• Mark changed lines with a margin asterisk
• Generate sides from the current revision, every time