Hi, my name is Arnon Shorr.
I'm an indie filmmaker, been doing this for a while,
dozens of shorts and web series episodes
and micro-budget features,
and I'm here to talk to you about
stripboards and production schedules.
Stripboards are a really important piece
of your production planning process.
There are great way to visualize the schedule,
eventually to communicate it with the rest of your team.
Stripboards are called stripboards
because they used to be actual boards
with little strips of paper or cardboard
that you'd write each scene on, and rearranged by hand.
We're fortunate now
that most of this process is done digitally.
Most of these programs will accept a script
in final draft format.
They'll read that script, and break it down
into scenes and get your process started for you.
So let's start that here, we`ll hit "Import script."
Now in Studio Binder you can drag and drop.
So let's drag our script.
It's an .fbx file from "Final draft"
and there's our strips.
I'm prepared the script before I imported it.
A number of the scenes,
I made sure all the slug lines are consistent.
I make sure the character names are consistent.
If you don't do that,
there are ways to fix it, after the fact,
but it's much better to have
the script kind of audited and clean and ready to go
before you drag it in.
You see where the software identified characters
in this column here, the cast ID column.
Each of these numbers corresponds to a different character.
If you click on that, you can see, for example, here
in scene two, characters one and two, the first two characters
that appear in the script, are in this scene.
But if you have a scene in your script
where characters appear but do not speak,
the software might not pick up on that.
So let's take a look down here at scene 8.
It's exterior Los Angeles freeways.
It's 1/8 of a page. It`s a very very short scene.
Really, it's just a shot of this car driving through the freeways.
But we might want our characters visible in the car.
Let's add Kelly and Robert,
characters number 1 and 2 to that scene.
There we go, now Kelly and Robert's characters one, two,
appear in that scene.
So when the scheduling is happening people know, okay,
we need the actors for that scene.
Next thing we're going to do
is take a look at the shooting location column.
That's this column right here next to cast ID.
For each of the sets in your script,
you can assign a shooting location.
Now, this can be handy
because the sets in your script might not correspond to real places.
For example, in this script,
we have several different desert settings.
There's a winding desert road
and there's a straight flat stretch of desert,
and those are going to be two different locations.
So let's take a quick look here.
To identify all that, we're going to go to the shooting location column.
For each scene, we can hit "Assign location"
and assign a location to that scene.
I've already written in the locations
that are used in this script.
Let's say, I forgot one,
or I need to add more.
You can add location,
you can give the location name.
We'll call this "Winding Desert Road."
You can even put in an actual address
and it'll give you a link to map locations.
We're going to start reordering the strips on our stripboard now,
and getting them closer to a point
where we actually have a schedule.
If you're in a location, you're going to shoot all the scenes
that take place in that location together.
In order to do that,
the first thing we want to do is to reorder the strips.
Let's order by shooting location.
This is we're putting
in the shooting location information can be really handy
because there are sets that have different names,
but they're being shot in the same place.
So, now, we've reordered by shooting location.
That's much better.
So, for example, on this project,
we know if we're going out to the desert,
we really want to shoot as much of the desert stuff
at the same time as possible.
Maybe, we'll go to one desert location
and then do a company move to another desert location.
But if we're out there we want to shoot together.
So let's take a look at scenes, one, two, three and four.
These are exterior scenes in the desert at night.
Take them and move them together.
You can select multiple strips, here one and two.
Hit Command+X, select another strip and when you hit command V,
which is the paste command,
those scenes that you cut earlier get pasted after the strip
that you subsequently selected.
We have some exterior desert day scenes,
in slightly different desert area,
this scene 5 on the desert flats.
Let's take that and you can click and drag and drop, move that down.
This scene is listed as sunrise.
The way we have right now, we could shoot from night into dawn.
Another way to do it is reorder it
so that you start with the sunrise seen
but shoot it at sunset
because sunrise and sunset look the same on camera,
and start with that scene, and then shoot into the night.
Okay, so our desert scenes are together.
We have a bunch of scenes on the freeways.
We have scenes 6 and 8 which are just basically shots of the car driving through.
We want those together because when we shoot one,
we want to shoot the other.
Now, we've got all these scenes in the college.
We have an exterior.
Let's move that up to the top.
And we have a bunch of interiors,
the "Science and Math building entry hall', we`ve got two scenes there,
and we have an office.
I'm going to move the office to the end.
We'll keep these kind of in script order, for now,
that's kind of convenient to shoot.
Where we start outside the building,
and then move into the hall, and then move into the office.
So we have really three blocks of scenes.
We have a college, we have the roads,
and we have the desert.
One of the things that I like to do,
to help me see where these bits and pieces are,
I like to put in a banner.
So let's hit B, create a banner
and the first banner is going to be "College."
These banners probably will not remain
in your stripboard all the way through the end,
these are for you, just organizational tools.
So you can add a glance,
see where things are on your stripboard.
These are really handy if you're boarding a feature,
and you've got a 150 strips
and 20 different locations.
It's really helpful to add these banners to see
where your various scenes are.
This script has about 10 pages in it.
So we know we're not going to try to squeeze them all into one shoot day.
We're going to split this up into two shoot days.
With daytime scenes and nighttime scenes.
It's generally advisable to shoot daytime stuff first,
and then the next day shoot nighttime.
What happens if you reverse it, you shoot nighttime first,
everybody's exhausted,
they dragged home at 4:00 in the morning, whenever it is,
and then they've got to shoot daytime a few hours later,
there's not enough time in between.
So let's start with our daytime scenes and then go to the nighttime stuff.
We've got some daytime stuff at a college.
We've got some daytime stuff in the freeways,
and then we've got a bunch of stuff in the desert.
How should we split this up?
Adding a daybreak,
hit D, will describe this as our "College Day."
And assign a shoot date.
Okay, here we've got our daybreak.
Let's take a look.
End of day 1 of 1
because we haven't put in our second a break, yet.
It's our "College Day."
It adds up the pages in the scene.
So it's total pages - 7.
There are 7 pages on the college days scene.
It's kind of a lot
but it's all in one place.
So, you know, for this project, I think it's
it's kind of reasonable.
It shows us our shooting date as well.
Now we still have all this other stuff
that needs to get shot.
Let's add another daybreak.
We select that last slugline, Hit D, and this is our freeways and deserts.
Day two of our story freeways and deserts.
It added up the scenes,
total pages 7 and 7/8.
You know, on a 14 page script,
if you want to try to squeeze it into two days, splitting it
7 pages and 7 and a bit, not bad.
Another thing that can be kind of useful here,
we've got all this traveling stuff on the freeways.
You could shoot that on the way to the desert shoot,
so that you're actually utilizing some
of the transportation time, as production time,
which is kind of handy.
With bigger scripts,
with feature projects, things like that.
It can be very very useful to use this feature right here
which adds day brakes automatically.
What that does for you is it puts the day breaks in based on number of pages.
Let's say you want to shoot,
you've got a 120-page script,
and or let's make the math a little easier.
You've got a 100-page script
and you can afford 20 shoot day.
So, you know, you want to average about 5 pages a day.
So you click this button,
you add a break every five pages.
Click, "Add Day Breaks",
and you'll see every 5 pages,
or before it hits 5 Pages, it throws a daybreak into your schedule.
Now, we can start to think a little bit more specifically
about the logistics of production itself.
We can put in banners for things like company moves or meal breaks.
Select the strip, after which you want the banner to appear,
you hit B, call this "Our Meal Break."
And there we go.
Now we have a meal break, right in the middle of the day.
There is no company move on our first day,
but there's a lot of traveling in the second day.
Very very different kind of environment.
So there's a company move in there.
Select scene five,hit B,
add another banner, "Company move" and there we go.
Now, we know we shoot 3 pages,there's a move
Now, we're on these winding desert roads.
We've got some stuff in Kelly's Car.
We've got a big scene on the road itself.
And then, we've got these other two scenes in the desert,
and it kind of an open area.
If you take a look at the shooting locations,
I differentiated between "The Winding Desert Road,
and "The Desert Crash Area."
We can put another banner, right in here.
So there we go. This day is starting to look kind of complicated.
We've got driving stuff, and we've got company moves.
We really should think about where our meal break should be.
What I recommend here,
do the meal break before dusk,
so that in the event
that you're running a little bit late on the driving scenes,
you can push the meal break to after dusk
but you have some flexibility around sunset
because the sunsets not going to wait for you,
but the meal break could.
So we'll put our meal break in right here.
And with the understanding that,
if the Sun is setting and you got to chase it,
you can move the meal break to after dusk,
before it gets to be full night
when it's kind of hard to shoot stuff, anyway.
So before I save this and send it out,
I want to go through it one more time.
Just take a very close look,
make sure there aren't any opportunities to make adjustments to
the order of scenes within each day
and within each part of the day.
So, for example,
taking a look at the beginning of day two,
starting with scene 6 doesn't make sense.
And now we're thinking a little bit more logistically.
It's the Tejon Pass freeway.
It's a shot of the car going through that mountain pass into the desert.
It doesn't make sense to shoot that first
before we shoot stuff in the Los Angeles freeways.
So let's flip this around.
Let's do the Los Angeles freeways.
Scene 8 first,
and then while we're driving
between the Los Angeles freeways in the Tejon Pass.
We can shoot scene 7,
which is the conversation in the car.
Then we get to the Tejon Pass,
we can get out of the car, and get that shot of the car driving.
So geographically the order makes a little bit more sense now.
So our stripboards done.
Now, we can share it with the rest of the team.
To export to PDF, you hit this print stripboard button,
and instead of printing to your printer,
you print to a PDF printer
most computers have some form of "Save as PDF" option.
So you do that and it`s PDF and save,
it asks for a location, we`ll save it to the desktop for now.
And there you go.
You've got your PDF saved, you can email it to people.
Very very convenient.
Now, another thing that's very very convenient
is you can spin-off call sheets
from your shooting schedule.
Hit this button here, says "Create a new call sheet."
Let's do call sheet for day one.
Hit that button.
Call sheet title.
It's a shoot day.
You hit "Next." This allows you to add recipients, hit a button
and the call sheat goes out to your team,
and the call sheets going to list the scenes that are shot that day.
It's going to list who is in those scenes.
It's going to list the shooting location,
and it'll give you opportunities to edit the call sheet as well.
If you need to add, or augment, or change any of that information later on.
And that's it.
I hope you found this information helpful
and go out there break a lens.