Building a Shooting Schedule — grouping by location, time of day and cast on a stripboard

A stripboard turns each scene into a single strip you can move around to build the order. Each strip shows the scene number, INT or EXT and day or night, the location, the page count and the cast numbers. Moving a strip changes the order, so you can compare several versions quickly. Day-break strips go between scene strips to mark the end of each shooting day, and days off or travel days get their own strips the same way. Paper board or software, the principle is the same. Just scanning the colors shows you a week heavy with nights or a run of exterior days.

1. 01Group by locationPut scenes at the same location together. Every company move means loading gear and setting up again, so a single move can take a big bite out of the day.
2. 02Split by time of dayWithin a location, schedule day scenes first and night scenes after. Check the turnaround between days too, so a night shoot isn’t followed by an early call.
3. 03Fit the cast schedulesLong gaps between an actor’s first and last work days add schedule and cost pressure. Pull each actor’s scenes into nearby shooting days.
4. 04Plan for the unknownPut weather-dependent exterior scenes early in the schedule, and pick interior cover sets you can switch to if it rains.

Check each actor’s schedule on the day out of days (DOOD). With actors as rows and shooting days as columns, mark start work (SW), work (W), hold (H) and work finish (WF), and actors with long holds stand out at a glance. Spread out scenes that take extra time, such as those with children, animals, special effects or heavy emotion, so they don’t pile up on one day.

• First day — the crew is still finding its rhythm, so many shows start with relatively simple scenes.
• Big emotional scenes — schedule them after the actors have settled into their characters, or early in the day before they’re tired.
• Hair, makeup and wardrobe changes — group scenes with long makeup, like wounds or aging, on the same day to cut down time spent changing back.
• Location limits — lock in the dates for locations with fixed opening hours or limited availability first, then fit everything else around them.

Scene length is usually counted in eighths of a page. But one page of pure dialogue and one page of action take very different amounts of time. That’s why you look at setups (each time the camera moves to a new position) alongside pages. How many pages and setups make a reasonable day depends on genre, crew size and gear, so there’s no fixed standard. A realistic approach is to see how the first week actually goes and adjust the rest of the schedule.

The shooting days you build become the call sheet the day before. The schedule keeps changing during the shoot. Scenes you didn’t get move to another day, and for scenes you only partly shot, the remainder is split off and scheduled elsewhere. Share the revised schedule right away with production and the actors’ side so location bookings and cast schedules follow. In PDNote, too, you can move unshot scenes to another day and split partly shot scenes to reschedule the rest.