Stripboard template

What this is about

Before scheduling software, productions sorted colored paper strips on a board, and the method survives because the physics of it still apply: a scene is a unit with a location, a cast, a light condition and a length, and the cheapest order emerges when you can shuffle those units freely. The color coding is not decoration — it lets anyone spot at a distance that a night exterior sits stranded between two day interiors. Day-break strips then slice the sorted sequence into shooting days you can defend.

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

Where this differs from the general case:

• Strip fields for scene number, interior or exterior, day or night, location, cast IDs and page eighths — the whole scene in one readable line
• A consistent color scheme separating day interior, day exterior, night interior and night exterior, applied identically across the entire board
• Day-break strips carrying the date and expected wrap, so each shooting day has a declared end instead of an implied one
• Banner strips for company moves, rest days and holidays, because the gaps between shooting shape the plan as much as the shooting does

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Create one strip per scene from the script breakdown, carrying over cast IDs and page eighths exactly as counted there.
2. Apply the color code for interior, exterior, day and night, and fix any scene where the breakdown left that ambiguous.
3. Sort by location first, then by light condition within each location, then by cast availability across the whole sequence.
4. Insert day-break strips and check the load of each day in eighths, shifting strips until no single day carries a fantasy.
5. Test the sort against reality: actor holds, location windows, permit dates — every constraint moves strips, so let it.
6. Keep the final order synced with the shooting schedule, and re-sort the board first whenever a location or a booking falls through.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Strips without page eighths, which makes every shooting day look equally heavy when none of them are
• Letting the board and the schedule drift apart until neither describes the shoot anymore
• Sorting purely by location and discovering the lead actor now works eleven days in a row

With TillyGen

In TillyGen the plan behaves like a board: reorder scenes and the shooting days, call sheets and cast times re-balance around the new order instead of breaking.

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.