Plan a stripboard schedule

What this is about

The stripboard predates software and survives inside every scheduling tool because its logic is the job itself: each scene becomes a strip carrying location, INT/EXT, day or night, cast and estimated length — and the schedule emerges from sorting those strips into days. Shooting order almost never matches story order; it matches whatever spares the most re-rigs, moves and idle talent. The board makes trade-offs physical: pull the night scene forward and the turnaround problem appears immediately as a day that no longer closes. That visibility, not nostalgia, is why the format persists.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• The strip is the unit of negotiation: moving one strip shows its consequences across the whole board.
• Sort order is a hierarchy: location first, then INT/EXT, then day/night, then cast availability — deviations need a reason.
• Day breaks are promises: the strips above a break must genuinely fit the hours of that day.
• Versioning matters because the board changes daily in prep — everyone must know which board is current.

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Turn every scene from the breakdown into a strip: scene number, location, INT/EXT, day or night, cast, estimated length. Incomplete strips schedule nothing.
2. Sort by location first — every location change on the board is a company move in reality, and moves are the most expensive whitespace in a schedule.
3. Within each location, cluster INT/EXT and day/night so lighting states change as rarely as possible.
4. Layer cast availability on top and resolve conflicts now: an actor present on the wrong day is a re-sort today and a crisis in three weeks.
5. Cut the board into days with honest capacity — hours, setups, meal breaks — and resist the strip that 'probably fits' at the bottom of a full day.
6. Mark company moves as their own strips with real durations, so the cost of every location change stays visible in the plan.
7. Iterate with first AD and DP until no day is overloaded, then lock a version, name it, and distribute — every later change gets a new version name.
8. Keep banner strips for fixed points — talent windows, location access hours, sunset — so re-sorting never silently violates a hard constraint.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Scheduling in story order because it feels natural — and paying for it in re-rigs and moves.
• Days that only close on paper because moves and meals were left off the board.
• Three circulating versions of the board, each believed by a different department.

With TillyGen

TillyGen sorts the strips for you: from briefing and shotlist it drafts a schedule grouped by location and lighting state, and a moved scene re-sorts its consequences instantly.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.