Pre-Production
Everything between the script and day one.
Prep is where films are actually made or lost — and it is the phase most tools cover in fragments. Breakdown here, schedule there, shot lists in a spreadsheet, crew over WhatsApp. ScenePaper runs the whole of prep in one project, including finding the people.
What is pre-production software?
Pre-production software covers the planning phase between a locked script and the first day of photography. It handles script breakdown, scheduling, shot lists and storyboards, budgeting, location and department prep, and crew engagement — turning a screenplay into a shootable plan.
What you get
Breakdown
Scene-by-scene element tagging that feeds the stripboard, Day Out of Days and call sheets downstream.
Scheduling
Colour-coded stripboard, shoot days, what-if scenarios and generated Day Out of Days.
Shot lists and boards
Coverage planned with full camera metadata, with storyboard frames attached to entries.
Budget
Three-tier budget with cost reports and change orders routed through approvals.
Departments
Art, VFX, sound and post each get their own filtered view of the breakdown and their own prep workflow.
Crew
Scout, hire, contract and onboard verified crew into the project — at zero commission. No other prep tool does this.
Prep is where the money is decided
By the first shoot day, most of a production's cost is already locked. The schedule is set, the crew is engaged, the locations are booked. What happens on set is largely execution of decisions made weeks earlier.
That makes prep the highest-leverage phase to get right, and the phase where tool fragmentation hurts most. Every boundary between a breakdown tool, a scheduling tool and a spreadsheet is a place where a decision gets made twice or not at all.
The prep chain, end to end
Each step is generated from the last rather than re-entered:
- Script locked — written here or imported as Fountain
- Breakdown — elements tagged scene by scene, by category
- Stripboard — strips generated, ordered into shoot days
- Day Out of Days — derived from cast usage across the order
- Shot lists — coverage planned per scene, frames attached
- Budget — costed against the schedule that drives it
- Departments — each prepping from its own slice of the breakdown
- Crew — scouted, hired and contracted into the same project
The part nobody else covers
Every serious prep tool handles breakdown and scheduling. None of them help you find a gaffer.
Crew engagement is the single largest piece of prep work and it happens almost entirely outside production software — in phone contacts, WhatsApp groups and personal networks. ScenePaper puts a verified crew marketplace in the same project as the schedule, so the person you hire lands directly on the shoot days you hired them for.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
- What does a pre-production workflow actually look like in it?
- Script in, then breakdown each scene for cast, props, wardrobe and locations; the breakdown feeds the schedule, so stripboard days are built from tagged elements rather than typed twice. Scheduling produces shoot days and a Day Out of Days; those days generate call sheets, and the crew on them come from the roster you hired through the same project. Each step reads the one before it, which is the part a folder of spreadsheets cannot do.
- What does pre-production include?
- Script breakdown, scheduling, shot lists and storyboards, budgeting, location scouting, department prep, and hiring cast and crew. It runs from the locked script to the first day of photography.
- How long does pre-production take?
- It varies enormously by scale — a short might prep in two weeks, an indie feature in six to twelve, a studio feature far longer. The constraint is usually crew and location availability rather than the planning itself.
- Does this replace a separate scheduling tool?
- Yes. Stripboard scheduling, shoot days, what-if scenarios and the Day Out of Days are all included, generated from the breakdown rather than re-entered.
- Can I hire crew through it?
- Yes, and this is the main difference from other prep tools. Scout verified crew, hire them into the project, issue contracts and collect wrap reports — at zero commission.
- Is it suitable for shorts and commercials?
- Yes. The chain scales down — a commercial might use breakdown, shot list and call sheets and skip the rest. Each piece works on its own.
- Is it free?
- There is a free tier covering the full prep chain, plus crew hiring at zero commission.
Terms explained
- 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.
- 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.
- Breakdown sheet
- A breakdown sheet is the one-page record of a single scene's requirements produced during a script breakdown. It carries the scene number, its length in eighths, the location, day or night, a one-line synopsis, and every tagged element grouped by department.
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