Reading the stripboard

The header

The line under Shoot Schedule gives the total pages and the number of days. On a phone, the buttons fold into an Actions menu.

A day

The day header shows, left to right:

1. Shoot Day and its number, then the date if it has one.
2. Its shooting window, from First Shot to the end of the last strip, once a first shot is set.
3. Call times, as Crew, Cast and Set.
4. Length in hours, and page count.

An empty day reads Drop strips here.

A strip

Each strip shows:

1. INT or EXT.
2. The location name.
3. The time of day, such as DAY, NIGHT or DUSK.
4. Its length in pages, in eighths.
5. The scene numbers it holds.
6. The time it starts, on the right.
7. A tag for each character in it.

If a scene has storyboard panels, its strip lists only the characters who appear in those panels. That keeps actors off days where they aren’t in any shot.

A scene marked CONTINUOUS joins the strip before it. A scene with no location gets a strip of its own.

How times are worked out

Each eighth of a page takes 20 minutes. A full page is 2 hours 40 minutes. The day starts at First Shot, or 10:00 AM if there isn’t one.

Three kinds of line fill in by themselves:

1. Lunch, one hour long, after four hours of work.
2. Company Move, 30 minutes, when the next strip is at a new location. It names both places.
3. WRAP, at the end of the last strip.

Sun times

When a day has a date, a column on the left marks Dawn, Sunrise, Golden, Sunset and Dusk beside the strips they fall near. The times are worked out for that date at the day’s first location with a Latitude and Longitude. If no location on the day has them, the app uses Los Angeles on Los Angeles time.

The app finds the time zone from the same Latitude and Longitude, so the times read on the clock at the location, with daylight saving where it applies. Everyone on the project sees the same times, wherever their own computer is.

With sun times on, two warnings can show on a strip:

1. DAY FOR NIGHT: a night or evening scene set to shoot before dusk.
2. NIGHT FOR DAY: a daytime interior set to shoot after dusk.

Unscheduled

Strips on no day wait under Unscheduled, faded. Drag one onto a day to place it. When this list is empty, every scene has a day.

Weekends

Weekends: Off counts dates Monday to Friday from the project’s start date. Weekends: On counts every day. It only changes dates the app counts for you, not dates you typed in.