Shooting Schedule Software: Stripboard, Built From Your Breakdown

Stripboard logic, without the manual re-entry

Group scenes by location and cast availability, reorder for shoot-day efficiency, and see day-out-of-days status for every cast member — all generated from the breakdown you already have, editable like a real stripboard once it's built.

Connects to locations and equipment planning

A locked schedule feeds directly into Locations & Recce and Camera & Equipment planning, so the shoot-day grouping that drives your schedule also drives what gear and locations get booked for which days.

What a stripboard actually is

A stripboard is the traditional tool a first assistant director uses to plan a shoot: one physical or digital strip per scene, color-coded by interior/exterior and day/night, arranged in shoot order rather than script order so a production can group scenes by location and cast availability instead of shooting page one to the end. Reordering strips is how a real production schedule gets built — a scene that's page 40 in the script might shoot on day one because that's when the location is available.

The Story Maker generates a full stripboard from your script breakdown automatically — every scene arrives as a strip with its color-coding, cast, and location already tagged, and you reorder and regroup strips the same way you would on a physical board, without re-entering a single scene by hand.

Day Out of Days (DOOD): tracking every artist's dates

A Day Out of Days report — DOOD for short — tracks, for every cast member, which shoot days they're working, on hold, or wrapped. It's the document that answers "how many days do I need to pay this actor for" and "is anyone double-booked across two units on the same day," and it's usually assembled by hand from the shooting schedule, cross-referencing every actor against every day.

Because The Story Maker's schedule is built from the same tagged breakdown as your DOOD, artist dates update automatically the moment the schedule changes — no separate spreadsheet to keep in sync as scenes move, and no manual recount when a shoot day gets added or dropped.

One-liner schedule: the quick daily summary

A one-liner schedule is the condensed, single-line-per-scene version of a shoot day — scene number, brief description, cast, location, and estimated time, at a glance, without the full stripboard detail. Production teams use it as the fast-reference document for a shoot day when the full schedule is too much detail for a quick check.

Because the one-liner view is generated from the same underlying schedule data, it stays accurate day to day without a separate manual condensing pass — useful for a quick morning huddle or a producer who just needs the shape of the day, not the full stripboard.

Stripboard, DOOD and the logic underneath

Ordering scenes is a constraint problem, not a sorting problem. Scenes group by location to avoid company moves, by time of day because you cannot shoot a night exterior at noon, and by cast because holding an actor idle between two distant scenes costs money whether they work or not.

The stripboard applies those constraints against the tagged breakdown, and the Day Out of Days report falls out of the same data — every cast member's work, hold and travel days across the shoot, which is what turns a schedule into a number the budget can use.

When the schedule moves, everything downstream moves

Schedules change constantly: weather kills an exterior, a location falls through, an actor's availability shifts. The cost of that is rarely the reordering itself — it is the six other documents that quietly still describe the old plan.

Because call sheets, DOOD and cast holds read from the schedule rather than holding their own copies, a change propagates instead of requiring you to find every document that mentioned the moved day. That is the difference between a schedule and a spreadsheet of a schedule.

Frequently asked questions