Script breakdown template

What this is about

Every requirement list on a shoot descends from the breakdown — props, wardrobe, vehicles, extras, special equipment all trace back to a marked word in a scene. Skipping it does not remove the work; it moves the work to the shooting day, where a missing prop costs setups instead of an email. The breakdown also produces the page-eighth counts that scheduling and budgeting run on, which is why it comes before both. One sheet per scene, categories marked consistently, and the departments stop guessing.

A template is the starting point, not the goal: once it has been filled in by hand twice, it is worth asking whether the document should come out of the plan instead.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• A scene header with number, interior or exterior, day or night and set name, matching the script exactly so nothing gets counted twice
• Element categories — cast, extras, props, wardrobe, vehicles, effects — each marked in its own consistent way through the whole script
• A page-eighth count per scene, because scene length in eighths is what the stripboard and the budget will later calculate with
• A rollup per department that aggregates all marked elements into one requirement list with the scenes they appear in

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Lock the scene numbering first; a breakdown against shifting numbers produces lists that point at the wrong scenes.
2. Read the script once per category and mark every element of that category, because hunting all categories in one pass misses the quiet ones.
3. Create one breakdown sheet per scene and transfer the marked elements into their category fields.
4. Measure each scene in page eighths and note it on the sheet — an eighth is one eighth of a script page, counted generously.
5. Aggregate the sheets into department lists: every prop, costume and vehicle with its scenes, owners and open questions.
6. When the script revises, break down only the changed scenes and update the rollups, so the lists stay alive instead of historic.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Budgeting before breaking down, which prices a film nobody has counted yet
• Skipping short scenes — the one-eighth night exterior with rain is routinely the most expensive line of the week
• Never re-breaking revised scenes, so the departments prepare version one while the set shoots version three

With TillyGen

TillyGen decomposes your briefing into scenes and setups as a starting structure, so the counting starts from a plan instead of a blank highlighter.

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.