The stripboard

What a shoot day holds

Field	What it does
Day number	Its position in the shoot. Day 1, Day 2, which is what the call sheet is titled by.
Date	The calendar date. Drives the solar markers, so a day with no date has no golden hour.
Crew call	When crew are on the clock. The headline time on the call sheet.
Cast call	When performers are called, usually later than crew.
On-set call	When the unit is set up and ready to work.
First shot	The target for turning over. The number that gets missed and quietly resets the day.
Notes	Anything for this day specifically. Carried onto its call sheet.

Strips

Each strip is a scene, showing its heading, its location, its page count and its cast. Drag a strip to another day’s drop zone to move it, or within a day to reorder. The order in a day is the order you intend to shoot.

Scenes not yet placed sit in the unscheduled column. An empty unscheduled column means every scene has a day, which is a genuinely useful thing to be able to see at a glance.

Weekends controls whether auto-generation is allowed to place days on Saturdays and Sundays. Turn it off and the generated schedule respects a five-day week.

The solar timeline

For a day with a date, the timeline marks dawn, sunrise, golden hour, sunset and dusk at real times. These are computed for the actual date, so a schedule that slips two weeks in autumn shows you that your magic-hour scene has lost forty minutes.

It’s also the quickest sanity check on a night shoot: if the day’s strips need six hours of darkness and the timeline says you have four, that’s a conversation to have now.

Timeline events

Beyond scenes, a day carries events: company moves, meal breaks, unit moves. They occupy time, which means a day with a two-hour company move stops pretending it has two extra hours of shooting in it.