TillyGen vs Movie Magic Scheduling

What Movie Magic Scheduling is for

Long-established scheduling application built around the stripboard, a standard in scripted production.

Scripted features and series where the stripboard is the shared language.

Pure scheduling tools are strong when the schedule is the problem — and silent about everything upstream of it. They assume a finished breakdown: if the scenes are not yet in strips, there is nothing useful to open the stripboard editor for.

Where Movie Magic Scheduling is strong

A comparison that only lists your own upsides is not one. This is what speaks for Movie Magic Scheduling:

• The stripboard implementation the industry standardised on
• Handles complex scripted schedules with many elements
• Output is recognised by every experienced 1st AD

Where the limits are

And these are the points where teams run into limits in practice — not as a flaw, but as a consequence of the design:

• Desktop-first workflow with licence-bound installation
• The schedule is arranged manually; constraints are not computed for you

Where TillyGen takes a different route

TillyGen produces a stripboard too, but derives it from constraints — daylight, travel, crew availability — rather than manual arrangement.

TillyGen turns a brief into a shoot-ready package: shot list, storyboard, schedule and call sheet that stay connected. Change the creative direction and the affected shots are flagged rather than quietly left behind.

Which tool when

In short: Scripted features and series where the stripboard is the shared language. If your bottleneck is instead getting from a brief to a plan that holds, that is where TillyGen starts.

The useful question before switching is not which tool does more, but where the process stalls today. Three bottlenecks come up again and again in production teams, and they call for different tools:

• The plan comes together too slowly: days pass between the brief and a shoot-ready shot list, with the client already chasing.
• The paperwork drifts apart: shot list, schedule and call sheet live in three files, and after the second change none of them agrees with the others.
• Distribution eats the time: the plan is done, but every version has to be sent to twenty people by hand and chased up.

What to check before switching

Its file formats are a de facto standard, so exports usually travel well.

Switching tools mid-production almost always costs more than it saves on that job. The sensible moment is between two projects, with a pilot small enough to run twice if it comes to that. Check first whether the export formats match what post and accounting expect — migrations fail there more often than on features.