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Script Revision Colors: The Order and What They Mean
Revision colors are the page colors a script cycles through as it changes during production. The shooting script starts on white, the first revision is blue, and the order continues pink, yellow, green, goldenrod, buff, salmon and cherry.
Also called: script revision colors · script color order · colored pages · revision pages
The order
White, blue, pink, yellow, green, goldenrod, buff, salmon, cherry. Nine colors, in that order, every time. The first revision is always blue.
| Draft | Page color |
|---|---|
| Shooting script | White |
| 1st revision | Blue |
| 2nd revision | Pink |
| 3rd revision | Yellow |
| 4th revision | Green |
| 5th revision | Goldenrod |
| 6th revision | Buff |
| 7th revision | Salmon |
| 8th revision | Cherry |
| 9th revision | Double white, then double blue and so on |
Run out and you go back to white, called double white, and start the sequence again. Some studios add tan or gray after cherry; the production office’s revision memo is the one to follow.
Why paper colors at all
On a set with forty people carrying scripts you need to tell from across the room whether somebody is working off the current pages. Color does that faster than a date in a header ever will.
Only the changed pages get reissued, so a working script ends up striped. The stripes are a rough measure of how much the script has moved since the shoot started, which is information a producer usually wants and rarely enjoys.
What travels with a revision
Changed lines get an asterisk in the right margin. Pages do not renumber: an inserted page becomes 24A rather than pushing everything after it down one.
Scene numbers work the same way. A cut scene is marked OMITTED and keeps its number for good, because renumbering a scene that has already been on a call sheet causes exactly the confusion the colors exist to prevent.
