Scheduling

Page eighth

Also called Eighth, 1/8 page

What is page eighth in film production?

A page eighth is the standard unit of screenplay length used for scheduling. Every script page is divided into eight equal vertical strips, so a scene measured at 3/8 occupies three of them. Scheduling, day counts and stripboard lengths are all expressed in eighths rather than in pages.

The unit exists because scenes rarely start and end on page boundaries. Measuring a scene as 'about half a page' is unusable for planning; measuring it as 4/8 gives every department the same number to work from. A conventional shooting day runs somewhere between four and five pages — 32 to 40 eighths — though that figure moves enormously with format, budget and coverage.

Eighths measure physical space on the page, not screen time or difficulty. A 1/8 scene that reads 'The car explodes.' will consume a day. Treating eighths as a proxy for effort is the most common way a schedule built from them falls apart, which is why the breakdown carries element counts alongside the measurement.

Go deeper

Reviewed 2026-08-27

Related terms

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.

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.

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.

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.