Script

Coloured pages

Also called Colored pages, Revision pages

What is coloured pages in film production?

Coloured pages are script revisions distributed on tinted paper so that everyone can see at a glance which draft they are holding. Each new revision takes the next colour in a fixed sequence, and only the changed pages are reissued rather than the whole script.

The conventional order after the white production draft is blue, pink, yellow, green, goldenrod, buff, salmon, cherry — then the sequence repeats as double blue, double pink and so on. Changed lines carry an asterisk in the margin, and revised pages keep the original page number with a letter suffix so pagination never shifts.

The system exists so that a shooting crew of two hundred people can be certain they are working from the same version without reading a word. Distributing revisions as PDFs discards the signal unless the colour and asterisk conventions are preserved in the file.

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Script Revisions and Coloured Pages

Reviewed 2026-08-27

Related terms

Fountain

Fountain is a plain-text markup format for screenplays. A Fountain file is readable as ordinary text and needs no proprietary software, but carries enough convention — capitalised scene headings, centred character names, indented parentheticals — for software to render it as correctly formatted script pages.

Sides

Sides are the extract of a script containing only the scenes being shot on a given day, printed small and distributed to cast and crew on set. They are a working reference for the day's pages, not a copy of the screenplay, and are usually generated from the call sheet's scene list.

Script breakdown

A script breakdown is the process of reading a screenplay scene by scene and tagging every physical element a scene requires — cast, extras, props, wardrobe, vehicles, stunts, special effects, animals. The tagged result is what the schedule, the budget and every department's prep list are built from.