Scheduling
A shooting schedule you can argue with.
Scheduling is a series of trade-offs — actor availability against location cost, night shoots against turnaround, weather cover against page count. ScenePaper lets you build competing versions of the schedule and compare them, instead of committing to the first one that fits.
Comparing free options? Is free film scheduling software good enough?
What is film scheduling software?
Film scheduling software turns a script breakdown into a shooting order. Each scene becomes a strip carrying its cast, location, page count and time of day. Strips are grouped into shoot days to minimise company moves, cast hold days and overtime, and the result generates the Day Out of Days and daily call sheets.
What you get
Colour-coded stripboard
One strip per scene, coloured by the convention — white interior day, yellow exterior day, blue interior night, green exterior night — showing location, page eighths and estimated time.
Move strips between days
Pick a shoot day on any strip — or send it back to Unscheduled — and move it earlier or later in its day. Lock a strip you don't want moved.
What-if scenarios
Save the current board as a scenario, compare two on shoot days and scheduled strips, and promote one back to the live schedule.
Day Out of Days
Compute start, work, hold and drop per cast member from the cast tags on scheduled strips, with alerts for long runs of hold days.
Conflict detection
The commitment calendar flags crew booked on overlapping dates across your productions — two roles on the same film are not a clash.
Who each day needs, and where you are short
Set how many of each role a shoot day needs — the day's scenes suggest the specialists, like a genset and extra electricians for a night exterior, each with its reason. Pencil people in on hold or confirm them, and every day shows what it is short: three electricians short on Day 12, before Day 12.
Schedule changes that reach the crew
Move a shoot day and everyone booked on it is flagged until they are confirmed again. People on ScenePaper are told at once; the page lists the rest, with their numbers, to phone. Dates a person has said they cannot work, and double bookings across your productions, are refused unless you book them anyway.
Straight to call sheets
Create a call sheet for any shoot day and fill its crew from the roster booked for that day.
Who can change the schedule — set per film
By default producers, line producers, ADs, coordinators and the director can move strips and days; a viewer can only look. Each production can change that — let a viewer schedule this one film, or keep the coordinator off it — and every change is logged. The owner can always edit.
Second-unit days
Mark a shoot day as second unit and it runs alongside the main unit's day of the same number: its own strips, its own crew plan, badged on the board so nobody mistakes it for a clash.
No double booking across productions
Crew who opt in show as on hold or booked elsewhere — never which film. Confirming them over another production's day asks first, and they are told.
Locations with rules
Mark a location weekends only, after 6 pm or closed during exams, and any shoot day that breaks the rule is flagged.
When is everyone free?
Pick the people a scene needs and see the dates they are all free.
Scheduling is comparison, not data entry
The hard part of a schedule is never entering it. It is knowing whether the version you have is better than the version you'd get by moving the beach scenes to week three.
Most scheduling tools model a single mutable schedule, so answering that question means wrecking your current one and rebuilding it if you were wrong. Scenario cloning means you keep both, compare shoot day count, cast hold days and company moves, and pick with evidence.
What a strip carries
Each strip is generated from a broken-down scene and stays linked to it, so a breakdown correction propagates rather than requiring a second edit:
- Scene number, slugline and synopsis
- Interior or exterior, day or night — driving the strip colour
- Page count in eighths
- Cast IDs required, pulled from the breakdown
- Location and estimated shoot time
Day Out of Days without the spreadsheet
The DOOD is a pure function of which cast appear in which shoot days — which is exactly why maintaining it by hand is miserable. Every reorder invalidates it.
Because strips carry their cast elements, the DOOD is generated on demand and correct by construction. Move a strip and the start, work, hold and drop pattern updates with it, along with the total hold days you're paying for.
From a schedule to a plan for each day
A stripboard says which scenes shoot on which day. It does not say who has to be there. That second question is answered every evening in a production office, usually in a notebook: how many electricians tomorrow, is the palace set ready, who have we held.
The Day plan keeps it with the schedule. Each day carries its sets — with a warning when a built set is scheduled before it is ready or after it is struck — the roles it needs, and the people held or confirmed for it. The shortfall is worked out, not remembered. Hold days are costed by the production's own rule, and a call sheet for a planned day is filled from the people confirmed for it rather than everyone on the roster.
Built for the schedule that keeps moving
Weather cover, an actor's availability collapsing, a location falling through the week before principal photography — the schedule is going to change. The design assumption here is that it will change often and late, so every downstream artefact is generated rather than maintained.
Is free film scheduling software good enough?
For a short film or a first feature, yes. A stripboard is a well-defined thing — one strip per scene, coloured by interior/exterior and day/night, ordered into shooting days, with a Day Out of Days falling out of the result. Free tools produce correct stripboards. The industry-standard desktop package buys you refinement and interchange with other productions, not a different concept.
The options, honestly
Every option below, answering the same three questions. Ours is one row among them.
| Option | What's free | Where it stops | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| ScenePaperOurs | A full colour-coded stripboard generated from your breakdown, drag-to-reorder strips, day breaks and banners, page counts in eighths, what-if scenarios you can compare side by side, automatic Day Out of Days, and crew conflict detection. | Web-based, and it schedules from a breakdown inside ScenePaper rather than importing another tool’s schedule file. There is no interchange with the industry-standard desktop format. | Shorts, first features and indie productions that need a real stripboard and cannot justify a per-seat licence. |
| StudioBinder | A modern browser stripboard with shooting schedules and breakdowns, available on a free tier. | The free tier caps how many scenes you can strip and how much of a screenplay you can import, and limits you to one project. | Scheduling a short or a commercial that fits inside the free caps. |
| Movie Magic Scheduling | Nothing. There is no free tier — it is the industry standard and it is licensed per seat. | Cost, plus a learning curve. It is genuinely excellent and genuinely out of reach for a student short. | Funded productions where the AD already knows it and other departments expect its files. |
| Gorilla Scheduling | No standing free tier, but priced for indie productions rather than studios, with a real stripboard and budgeting. | Still a paid purchase, and the interface shows its age next to browser tools. | Indie producers who want desktop scheduling and budgeting without studio pricing. |
| A spreadsheet | Free, and an honest fallback for a micro-budget shoot where a schedule is really just an ordered list of scenes. | No colour conventions, no eighths, no Day Out of Days, and reordering a day means retyping. It stops scaling the moment cast availability constrains the order. | A weekend shoot with one location and three actors. |
What you actually get free
The schedule is the middle of the chain, and both ends are free too:
- Fountain screenplay editor with revision colours, opening and saving Final Draft files
- Scene-by-scene script breakdown that feeds the schedule
- Colour-coded stripboard scheduling with what-if scenarios
- Day Out of Days, generated from the schedule
- Shot lists with camera metadata and storyboard frames
- Call sheets with revisions, read receipts and turnaround checks
- Budgets with cost reports and change orders
- Verified crew marketplace — hire at zero commission
All of it free — see what that means.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is a stripboard?
- A stripboard is the traditional scheduling view where each scene is a colour-coded strip. Colours encode interior/exterior and day/night. Strips are reordered and grouped into shoot days, and the resulting order is the shooting schedule.
- What do the stripboard colours mean?
- The convention is white for interior day, yellow for exterior day, blue for interior night and green for exterior night. Day breaks separate shoot days and banners mark company moves or holidays.
- Can I compare two versions of a schedule?
- Yes. Save the board as a scenario and compare two on shoot days and scheduled strips before promoting one to the live schedule.
- Is the Day Out of Days generated automatically?
- It is computed when you press Compute DOOD, from the cast tags on scheduled strips.
- Do I need to do the breakdown here to schedule here?
- Strips are created when you set up the production from your script, one per scene. You then schedule them onto shoot days here.
- Does it check for scheduling conflicts?
- For crew: the commitment calendar flags anyone booked on overlapping dates across your productions. It does not yet check cast availability while you schedule.
- Who can edit the schedule?
- Anyone whose role on the production allows it — by default producers, line producers, ADs, coordinators and the director, not viewers. The owner, producers and line producers can change that for a single production from "Who can do what on this production" on the project page. The owner can always edit, and the server refuses a change from anyone else rather than just hiding the button.
- Can I plan how many crew each shoot day needs?
- Yes. On the Day plan, each shoot day takes a requirement per role — three electricians, one generator operator — and the day's scenes suggest specialists with a reason, which you add or ignore. You hold or confirm people against it and the day shows what it is short. If a day's date changes, everyone booked on it is flagged until re-confirmed; people with ScenePaper accounts are notified, and the others are listed with their phone numbers.
- How much does it cost?
- Scheduling is available on the free tier, including scenarios and the Day Out of Days. Zero commission on anything you do on the platform.
- What is the best free film scheduling software?
- ScenePaper, if you need an uncapped stripboard and Day Out of Days without paying — the industry-standard desktop packages have no free tier at all. StudioBinder’s free tier is good if your production fits inside its scene cap. For a single-location weekend shoot, a spreadsheet is honestly fine.
- Is there a free alternative to Movie Magic Scheduling?
- Yes. Movie Magic Scheduling has no free version, but browser-based stripboards cover the same concept — strips per scene, standard colour conventions, day breaks, page counts in eighths and an automatic Day Out of Days. What you give up is file interchange with productions that expect its native format.
- Can I make a stripboard for free?
- Yes. On ScenePaper the stripboard generates from your script breakdown at no cost, with standard colour coding, drag-to-reorder strips, day breaks and banners, and page counts in eighths. Scenario comparison and Day Out of Days are included.
- What is a Day Out of Days?
- A grid showing which cast members work on which shooting days, marking each as start work, work, hold, or finish. It drives cast bookings, travel and holding fees, and it is generated from the schedule rather than maintained by hand — so it changes automatically when the schedule does.
- What do the stripboard colours mean?
- The standard convention is white for interior day, yellow for exterior day, blue for interior night and green for exterior night. The colours let an AD read the shape of a shooting day at a glance — how much night work, how many company moves — without reading a single scene number.
- Will ScenePaper start charging for scheduling?
- Everything is free right now. If paid plans arrive they will target funded productions with large teams, you will be told before anything changes, and nothing you have already scheduled will be taken away.
Terms explained
- Stripboard
- A stripboard is the shooting schedule represented as one coloured strip per scene, ordered in the sequence the production will actually shoot. Each strip carries the scene number, length in eighths, cast IDs, location and day/night. Reordering the strips reorders the shoot.
- Day Out of Days
- A Day Out of Days is a grid showing which cast and crew are required on which shooting days. Each row is a person, each column a day, and each cell is marked with a status code — start work, work, hold, drop, or finish. It is the document contracts and payroll are built from.
- Shooting day
- A shooting day is one scheduled day of principal photography, defined by its call time, its planned scenes and its wrap. It is the atomic unit of a production schedule: budgets, crew bookings and location agreements are all counted in days rather than hours.
- Company move
- A company move is the relocation of an entire unit — cast, crew, equipment and support vehicles — from one location to another during a single shooting day. It is scheduled as a block of lost time, typically one to three hours, during which no filming happens.
- Second unit
- A second unit is a smaller, separate crew that shoots material not needing the principal cast or the director — establishing shots, inserts, cutaways, driving plates, stunts — often on the same day as the main unit, under a second unit director who works to the director's plan.
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