What a stripboard is
A stripboard is the shooting schedule of a film, laid out as a column of thin horizontal strips, one strip per scene. Rearrange the strips and you rearrange the order in which the film is shot. It is the single most important planning artefact of the shoot, because films are almost never shot in script order - they are shot in the order that is cheapest and most practical, and the stripboard is where that order is worked out.
The name is literal. For decades it was a physical board of cardboard strips slotted into a wooden or metal frame, one colour of card per time-of-day, that a first assistant director would physically reshuffle. The digital version does the same job on screen.
Where it comes from: the breakdown
You cannot build a stripboard from the script alone. First the script is broken down: each scene is tagged with its cast, location, day or night, interior or exterior, and its page count. Each of those broken-down scenes becomes one strip. So the chain is always script → breakdown → stripboard → schedule → call sheets. Skip the breakdown and the board is guesswork.
The strips and their colours
Each strip is colour-coded by the scene's time and place, using a convention almost every production shares:
- White - Interior, Day
- Yellow - Exterior, Day
- Blue - Interior, Night
- Green - Exterior, Night
The colours let a first AD see the shape of a day at a glance: a run of yellow means daylight exteriors that live and die by the sun, a block of blue means you are indoors and lit and time-of-day matters less. Black strips are used as day breaks, separating one shooting day from the next.
What is on a single strip
Read left to right, a strip typically carries the scene number, the INT/EXT and DAY/NIGHT slug, a one-line description, the set or location, the page count in eighths, and the ID numbers of the cast required. That last part is the key to ordering the board.
How you order the board
Scheduling is the art of grouping strips to waste as little money as possible:
- Group by location. Shoot everything at a location while you are there. Moving the circus - the whole crew and its trucks - to a new location, a "company move", is one of the most expensive things a day can contain.
- Group by cast. An actor on a daily or weekly deal costs the same whether they work one scene or six. Cluster their scenes so you pay for fewer days.
- Respect day and night. You cannot shoot a green night exterior at 11am. Night work also carries turnaround rules for the following day.
- Watch continuity and load. Weather cover, stunt and effects prep, child-performer hours and actor turnaround all bend the order.
The output is a Day Out of Days - a grid showing which cast members work, hold or travel on each day. That document tells you exactly how many days you are paying each actor, which feeds straight into the budget.
Digital stripboards today
A modern stripboard keeps the colour language but adds what cardboard never could: drag a strip and every downstream document updates, the Day Out of Days recalculates itself, and the call sheet for each day is generated from the strips scheduled to it. The board stops being a static plan and becomes the live source the rest of pre-production reads from.
Where StoryboardCanvas fits
In StoryboardCanvas the stripboard is one view inside the Producer and scheduling apps, fed directly by the breakdown. Strips carry the standard INT/EXT day-night colours, reorder by drag, and roll up into a Day Out of Days automatically. Because it all lives in one project file, a scheduled day can generate its call sheet with cast, crew and location already filled in, and the day count flows into the budget without re-keying.