How a project works, end to end

A project is one film, series, or piece of content, and everything about it lives inside it — the script, the breakdown, the schedule, the crew, the money, the call sheets, and the wrap.

The important thing to understand before you open any of it: the stages are connected. Each one reads what the one before it produced. You are not filling in the same information five times in five tools; you are moving it forward. If you have run a production on a script PDF, a spreadsheet, and a WhatsApp group, that is the difference worth knowing.

Here is the whole spine, in order.

1. The script

Writers' Room is where the screenplay lives. Write in it directly, or import a Final Draft or Fountain file. It handles standard screenplay format, page count, and revisions — including the industry revision colours, so a page is identifiable as white, blue or pink the way it is on paper.

Story Room sits alongside it for the story itself rather than the pages: characters, arcs, threads and structure. If you are still working out what the film is, start there. If you already have a script, go straight to the Writers' Room.

2. The breakdown

Once there is a script, you break it down scene by scene. For each scene you tag what it needs — cast, props, wardrobe, vehicles, locations, and the rest.

This is the step people are tempted to skip, and it is the step everything after it depends on. A tagged element is what lets the schedule group scenes sensibly and what puts the right people on the right call sheet. Skip the breakdown and every later stage becomes manual again.

3. The schedule

Scheduling turns broken-down scenes into shoot days. Work on the stripboard, group scenes by location or cast or time of day, and reorder days by dragging.

Because the scenes carry their tagged elements, the schedule knows who and what each day needs. That produces the Day Out of Days — the grid showing, for every cast member, which days they work, start, finish, or hold. It is generated from the schedule, not maintained separately.

Shot Lists hang off the same scenes, for when you want to plan coverage shot by shot.

4. The crew

Crew reach a project two ways: you hire them through a Crew Call and they join the project roster, or you add them directly if you already know who you want. Actors are attached to characters through casting, which is what links a real person to the character the script wrote.

The roster is what the budget and the call sheets both read from — so once someone is on it, you stop re-typing their name.

5. The money

Budget tracks what the production plans to spend against what it has actually committed and spent. Crew you have booked can be pulled straight into budget commitments rather than re-entered, and the forecast accounts for open commitments as well as money already gone.

6. The shoot

Production Call Sheets are the daily document. Create one for a shoot day and it already knows the day's scenes and the crew on the roster, so most of it fills itself. Add call times, location, the nearest hospital, and issue it.

Issuing is deliberate — a call sheet is a draft until you issue it, and drafts are never shared. Once issued, you can see who has opened it and who has acknowledged it. If something changes, you revise it, and the revision records exactly which fields moved so crew are not left comparing two PDFs.

Dailies and take logging cover what actually happened on the day — takes, circled takes, and continuity notes with reference photos attached to the take they belong to.

7. The wrap

Wrap Reports close the loop: production and crew rate each other on a job that actually happened, which is what makes the ratings on a Crew Card mean something.

The short version

`` Script → Breakdown → Schedule → Call Sheets → Shoot → Wrap ↘ Casting ↗ ↑ Crew & Budget ──┘ ``

You do not have to use all of it. A commercial might use the schedule and call sheets and nothing else; a feature in development might live in the Story Room for months. But the further along the spine you go, the more each stage gives you for free — because the work is already in there.

What crew see

Crew on your project do not see any of the above. They see their own view: the days they are called, their scenes, their contract, and their call sheet. That is deliberate — a crew member should not have to read a production's schedule to find out when to turn up.