What Is a Stripboard? Film Scheduling Explained
A stripboard is a shooting schedule in which every scene is one colored strip. The order of the strips is the order you plan to shoot, which is almost never the order the scenes appear in the script.
Also called: production board · shooting schedule board
Why the strips are colored
Color carries the two facts that decide what can be shot together: interior or exterior, and day or night. White is interior day, yellow exterior day, blue interior night, green exterior night.
On a well-built board the colors cluster. Scattered color usually means a day that will not hold, because the unit is moving between an interior and an exterior, or chasing daylight that has already gone.
What each strip carries
Scene number, set, interior or exterior, day or night, the page count in eighths, and the cast numbers required. That is enough to see who is needed on a given day and how much material it represents, without opening the script.
Day breaks
Banners between groups of strips mark where one shooting day ends and the next begins. Move a strip across a banner and you have changed that day’s page count and the list of actors who have to be called.
A board that does not recalculate those totals while you drag is a picture of a schedule rather than a schedule.
