What Are Sides in Film? Daily Script Pages Explained
Sides are the few script pages a crew actually carries on the day: only the scenes scheduled for that day, printed small enough to fold into a back pocket.
Also called: script sides · daily sides
What goes in a packet
The scenes on that day’s call sheet, and nothing else. On a feature the full script is two hundred pages and the day is four of them. Handing out two hundred is how pages end up on the floor of a van.
They were traditionally photocopied at half size and folded, which is where the name comes from. Most units now print letter size or read them off a phone, but the typesetting has not moved: Courier 12, screenplay margins, scene numbers in both margins so you can find a scene with the page half folded.
Why the original page numbers matter
Sides have to keep the page numbers everyone else is working from. If the DOOD says a scene is on page 47 and the sides re-flow it onto page 3, the script supervisor and the department heads are reading different documents.
It sounds pedantic until the day somebody calls a page number over the radio and four people turn to the wrong scene.
Partial pages
A page often holds one scheduled scene and one that is not. The convention is to keep the whole page and box out the unscheduled scene with a cross through it, so a reader can see the gap is deliberate rather than a page that went missing at the copier.
