Stripboard
The stripboard, without the cork.
The physical stripboard survived a century because it is the right interface for scheduling — a scene is a strip, and you reorder them until the shape of the shoot makes sense. The board is digital now. The logic hasn't changed.
What is a stripboard?
A stripboard is a film scheduling tool where each scene is represented by a coloured strip carrying its cast, location, page count and time of day. Colours encode interior or exterior and day or night. Strips are reordered and grouped into shoot days to produce the shooting schedule.
What you get
Standard colour conventions
White for interior day, yellow for exterior day, blue for interior night, green for exterior night. Any AD can read the board on sight, because it follows the convention rather than reinventing it.
Shoot days as cards
Each shoot day is its own card with a date, location and second-unit flag, showing its page total and strip count.
Generated from the breakdown
Strips are created from your script's scenes, and each strip opens that scene's breakdown tags.
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.
Scenario comparison
Save the current board as a scenario, compare two on shoot days and scheduled strips, and promote one back to the live schedule.
Page counts in eighths
Page eighths per strip and totals per shoot day, so you can see at a glance whether a day is realistically shootable.
Why strips, and not a calendar
A calendar answers "what day is this scene on". A stripboard answers the question you actually have, which is "what order should these scenes be in". Order comes first; dates are a consequence.
That is why scheduling software that starts from a calendar view fights you. You end up dragging things between days to express a preference about grouping, which is what strips express natively.
What the colours encode
The colour convention is close to universal and is worth following exactly, because it lets anyone read a board without a legend:
- White — interior, day
- Yellow — exterior, day
- Blue — interior, night
- Green — exterior, night
- Day breaks separate shoot days; banners mark moves, travel and holidays
Grouping heuristics
Good boards cluster by location to cut company moves, keep night work together to protect turnaround, group cast to minimise hold days, and keep exteriors adjacent so weather cover is possible.
These trade off against each other constantly. The board shows cast hold days and move counts as you reorder, so the cost of a decision is visible while you are making it.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
- What do stripboard colours mean?
- White is interior day, yellow is exterior day, blue is interior night, green is exterior night. This convention is close to universal, which is why ScenePaper follows it exactly.
- What is a day break?
- A day break is the divider between two shoot days on the board. Strips above it are shot on one day, strips below on the next. Day breaks are what turn an ordered list of scenes into a schedule.
- What is a banner?
- A banner is a marker inserted between strips for something that isn't a scene — a company move, a travel day, a holiday, a unit split. ScenePaper doesn't have banners yet; note moves on the shoot day itself.
- How are page eighths counted?
- Script pages are traditionally divided into eighths for scheduling. Each strip carries its page count in eighths, and shoot days total them so you can judge whether a day is realistically shootable.
- Can I use the stripboard without doing a breakdown first?
- Strips are created when you set up the production from your script — one per scene — and the breakdown tags can be added later.
- Is it free?
- Yes, the stripboard is available on the free tier including scenario comparison. Zero commission on anything you do on the platform.
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.
- Page eighth
- 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.
- 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.
Get the templates and guides
Call sheets, breakdown sheets and DOOD grids as downloadable files, plus a note when we publish something new.
No spam, and unsubscribe from anything we send. See how we handle your address in the privacy policy.
Put your script on a board.
Break down the script and the strips build themselves.