Film scheduling software that boards a show like a 1st AD

01 · BREAKDOWN

One sheet per scene, with the script sitting right next to it.

Three modes from one control: the scene list with its full sheet, a project-wide element table, and the script text side by side with that scene's element board. Select a phrase in the script, pick a category, and the element lands on the sheet — the header tells you how many of the sheet's elements are actually anchored to text, so the ones that aren't stay visible instead of assumed.

• Page length in real eighths. "2 4/8", "12/8" and "2" all parse, steppers move one eighth, and bad input is refused with a worked example rather than silently rounded. Integer eighths from the field to the day total — a day's pages cannot drift by a rounding error.
• Every header field in place — scene number as free text ("12A" is fine), set, location, practical location, unit, episode, script day, INT/EXT, DAY/NIGHT/DAWN/DUSK plus your own phase, with a live strip-colour swatch that tracks the change.
• Thirty-three element categories on a new project — the 24 the industry has used for decades, in the order you know them, plus nine modern ones: intimacy coordinator, armoury, prosthetics, picture vehicles, background vehicles, playback, drones, choreography, marine. Anything you mark hazardous red-flags itself on the sheet and in every report.
• It won't let you make two of the same person. Type "Det. Morgan" when DETECTIVE MORGAN exists and it offers to link, not to create. Rename once and every scene, link and flag follows; a collision opens a merge instead of an error dialog.
• Every element opens a panel — its note on this scene, its DOOD days for the active board, symmetric links across categories (actor ↔ stunt double, picture car ↔ its double), and every scene it appears in.
• Where a value came from is on the face of the sheet — a free offline scan, an AI proposal, or your own hand. Edit an AI-filled field and its mark clears.

Practical location is its own field, separate from the slugline. It's the one real address the company parks at — and the engine clusters on it, so a set name that drifts across ninety headings stops splitting into ninety locations.

02 · STRIPBOARD

The board you already know, with the arithmetic done for you.

Read it by colour without reading a word — INT-Day white, EXT-Day yellow, INT-Night blue, EXT-Night green, dawn and dusk of their own. Drag with a real insertion line, ⌘-click and ⇧-click to build a selection and move the whole thing, cut and paste strips like text, nudge one slot with a keystroke.

• Day breaks are live summary rows, not dividers — date, weekday, END OF DAY n, scene count, pages in eighths, estimated hours, all recomputed the moment a strip moves, with an amber tick once the day passes six pages.
• Sorting shows you what it will destroy before it does it — "Removes 12 day breaks", "Forces 3 banners to the top" — against a live preview, with one click to sort into a new scenario instead of the board you're working on.
• Search finds elements, not just headings. Type "rain machine" and every strip carrying it outlines, across every unit tab.
• Several units as tabs, each with its own tint and live strip count — plus scenario boards you can clone, compare in split view, and send strips between.
• Nothing on the board deletes. It relocates. The Boneyard is a deliberately muted, calendar-less drawer you drop strips into and pull them back from — and imported or wrapped scenes land there rather than vanishing.
• Banners for COMPANY MOVE, LUNCH, and whatever else the day needs.

03 · THE SCHEDULING ENGINE

How it boards

It asks three things — how many shoot days, how many days a week, and when you start. Then it drafts. The number you give is absolute: you get exactly that many days, or an honest note telling you what realistic looks like. It will never quietly hand you back a longer schedule.

There is no AI in this part at all. Three questions in, a deterministic plan out, arriving as a proposal you approve, edit or reject. The panel says so on its own face: Runs on this Mac — no internet, no API key.

It promises a strong first draft, not a hundred per cent. The final word is always yours.

It tells you what it traded.

Every schedule is a set of compromises. Most tools hide theirs. First AD writes its down — which rule it bent, why, and what it cost you in return visits, company moves and premium days.

Then it argues with itself. Nine craft checks run after every board and every edit: a turnaround breach · a day after a night inside one day · an exterior sitting off its true day/night · a connected sequence split across days · an irreversible prop shot out of order · a controllable interior split across two visits · a minor on a night or an overloaded day · calendar-arithmetic drift · a location block broken by an interleaved location. It advises. You decide.

04 · DAY OUT OF DAYS

A Day Out of Days that can't go stale.

It is derived from the board every time you look at it — never hand-entered, never stored, no "regenerate" step to forget. Move a strip and the matrix has already changed.

• Any category can be the subject, not just the ones that ship DOOD-eligible: cast, background, stunts, vehicles, animals, special equipment — or a category you invented yourself.
• The standard letter codes — S, SW, W, WF, SWF, H, D, PW, TR, FT, R, M — each with a plain-language explanation on hover, cells tinted by family so work, hold, drop and travel read at a glance.
• Your production's own payroll posture, set once and re-derived instantly: holds on or off, drop-to-pickup on or off, and the minimum gap that justifies a drop. Header chips read HOLD ✓ and DROP ≥ 5D, so the current deal-memo stance is visible without opening anything.
• Built to be read on a long board — element column frozen left, dates pinned top, work/hold/total frozen right, all three tracking one scroll. Click a name to isolate that person: their row bands, their working days ring, everything else dims.
• Violations show where they happen — a red dot on the name, a red outline on the cells, and the same facts ranked in a conflicts panel that jumps you straight to the strip.
• Export as PDF, CSV, or one workbook carrying both the matrix and the summary.

The craft rulings are in the codes: an element's first day is SW and its last is WF, and a one-day engagement is SWF. Travel, holiday and company-move overlays stamp on top of the payroll codes rather than replacing them, so a move landing on a work day can never corrupt the counts underneath.

05 · CALENDAR

The shoot on real dates.

Month or week, per unit, each with its own start date, work week and holidays. Month mode stacks every month the production touches into one continuous scroll instead of making you click forward a month at a time.

• No "+3 more". Every scene in a day is visible — the week row sizes itself to its fullest day, and all the height it gains goes to the scene list, never to the header.
• Drag a scene onto another day to move the strip, or onto another chip to reorder inside the day. A multi-selection drags together, lands in order, and undoes as a single step.
• Typed events — rehearsal, fitting, scout, recce, holiday, travel, company move — with code chips, multi-day spans, and element binding that follows the DOOD rule: a fitting stamps only the people named, a company move stamps everyone with an exclusion editor.
• A timed event fires a real notification at a lead you choose, including when First AD isn't running — once you've allowed notifications.
• Change a start date against a preview first — a table of DAY n · old date → new date, counted and flagged, then commit or cancel. The schedule never re-flows under you.
• PRE-LIGHT, BUILD and TRAVEL days that carry no DOOD code and never consume a day against your target.
• Sun times and holiday clashes are computed on your Mac. Sunrise, sunset, solar noon and civil twilight come from the app's own solar maths — no service in the loop — and a public-holiday calendar flags the shoot dates that land on one.
• Weather cover on demand: ask what could work instead on a given date and it lists the floatable interiors whose cast can actually work it. It jumps you to the strip. It moves nothing.
• Export the calendar exactly as laid out, one page per month — or push shoot days to your Mac's calendar — explicit, opt-in, one-way, and it never deletes anything there.

06 · REPORTS

Fourteen reports. Three formats. One model.

One-line schedule · shooting schedule · elements · element detail · DOOD · DOOD summary · breakdown · daily category totals · calendar · conflicts · day-by-day breakdown · category breakdown · progress · script revision. Each one previews as real paginated pages before you commit to anything.

• PDF, spreadsheet or CSV — and Print, with the same pagination as the PDF.
• Options are applied to one shared model, not inside a renderer. Hide a column and it disappears from the PDF, the spreadsheet and the CSV alike — no format can drift from another.
• The spreadsheet is a real workbook, not a picture of a table. The UPM can sort it and cost from it directly.
• Scope per report — board, unit, shoot-day range, category, and whether the Boneyard comes along.
• The DOOD prints landscape as a wide matrix, sliced across pages with the name column repeated on every slice, so a date column is never orphaned from its subject.
• On an episodic show, scope any report to one episode — except conflicts. That carve-out is deliberate: a conflict is a cross-episode truth, and filtering it could hide a real collision.
• Your company name and logo on every page, shared with the call sheets.

07 · CALL SHEETS

The day's sheet, assembled from the board and hand-finished.

Twelve blocks in the printed sheet's own order — calls, weather and sun, key contacts, locations and nearest hospital, schedule and advance, cast grid, atmosphere, department calls, walkie channels, scene notes, notes and safety, appearance. A commercial gets a thirteenth for agency and client.

• Filled from the board: the day's scenes with their pages, the cast rows with their board numbers, the status letter per cast row derived live from the DOOD engine, and the advance block from the next shoot day.
• Filled from your own data: actor names from Cast & Extras; key contacts seeded with UPM, 1st AD, 2nd AD and production office then merged with your positioned contacts; scene notes off the breakdown sheets; atmosphere from the background elements.
• Sunrise and sunset are computed locally and work offline. Weather comes from a free public service that needs no account, and the nearest hospital resolves from the first location's address with its distance. None of them can block a preview, an export or a send.
• Every machine-filled value wears a dot — hollow for derived, filled for AI — and every one of them is editable. Edit a linked row and it overrides for that sheet only. Delete one and it stays deleted, even though the source data still exists.
• Preview, export and send run through one document factory, so the PDF you approved is provably the PDF that goes out.
• Company moves get a real drive time from the Mac's built-in mapping — and when a route won't resolve, the sheet prints "verify manually" rather than a guessed number.
• Your logo, your band colours, your director credit — and an optional shot-board appendix of the day's frames.

Sending has no server in the path. Mail leaves your Mac through your own email account. The gate is recipients → preview → Approve & Send → a dialog naming the file and the exact recipient count, and only that confirm fires it. Each recipient gets their own message with their own address in the To: field, so a crew list is never leaked across the crew. A delivery log keeps per-recipient receipts with the server's verbatim reply, and re-sending a failure re-renders the current sheet — an old PDF is never silently sent again.

08 · SCRIPTS, REVISIONS & EDITING

New pages don't wipe your work.

Import Final Draft, PDF, Fountain or plain text — and an already-tagged breakdown from an industry scheduling export, which reports every value it couldn't map rather than dropping it quietly.

• PDF import is deterministic and needs no key. The text layer is read page by page, sluglines, printed numbers and character cues recovered by grammar, and page length measured from each heading's span to the next. A page with no text layer is reported as scanned and never blocks the rest of the import.
• A second screenplay appends, it doesn't replace. Each script keeps its own colour, its own revision chain and its own scene count, all feeding one scheduling pool.
• Imported scenes land in the Boneyard. An import never silently populates a working schedule.
• Compare any two drafts — added, removed, changed, unchanged, with a separate renumbered badge, old and new panes, and a per-line diff.
• Renumber immunity is the design point. Scenes are matched by content and the match deliberately ignores the scene number, so a renumbered but untouched scene classifies as unchanged and keeps everything linked to it.
• Importing a draft as a revision precomputes the whole diff for free and warns you by name about removed scenes that are currently scheduled or pinned — before anything moves.
• A removed scene retires with a recoverable tombstone naming the revision it died in. Nothing is silently deleted.
• Revision colours follow the industry sequence — white, blue, pink, yellow, green, goldenrod, buff, salmon, cherry — and wrap.

The Doctor reads it before it poisons the board.

Real screenplays arrive broken. A free, offline scan — no key, no internet — reads the draft and reports what will hurt you later, each finding anchored to the line it came from.

• Missing and duplicate scene numbers, and gaps in the numbering — with in-between numbers proposed the way the industry writes them.
• Malformed sluglines that won't parse into a set, an interior or exterior, or a time of day.
• Set-name drift — one location spelled three ways across ninety headings, which is how a single place becomes three on the board.
• Scenes whose day or night is silent, including a location that leaked into the day/night field.
• Findings arrive grouped by type, each with its quoted evidence. Accept one, accept a group, or apply the lot — and every applied fix lands as one tracked revision that Compare can diff, so a single undo returns the whole batch.

An optional AI read sits on top of that scan for the judgment-level problems — a heading that contradicts its own content, contextual location drift, story days, minors on set. It never fires on import and never edits the script on its own.

You can also edit the script in place. Split at the cursor and the eighths split proportionally with the exact total preserved; merge with the next and they sum exactly; the sheet keeps its identity through both, so breakdown links, strip identity and day placement survive script surgery. Every save is one tracked revision that Compare can diff. Tags whose text no longer exists are listed in an unanchored-tags dock rather than silently dropped — and a scene already marked SHOT is read-only.

09 · SHOT LISTS

The columns a camera department actually fills in.

Shot number, size, angle, movement, lens, body, setup, subject, description, estimated minutes and status — with fixed industry vocabulary in the menus: eight sizes, eight angles, thirteen movements, four statuses.

• Group by setup, with the shot count and the summed minutes on the band. That's the number a 1st AD schedules from.
• Anything that can't be mapped is kept verbatim — "size as written: BCU" — instead of being normalised into a default that quietly loses what the DP asked for.
• Link a shot to a storyboard frame and the thumbnail renders on the row; the frame carries the reciprocal chip.
• Drop scout photos onto a row. Detaching removes the reference; the file is never auto-deleted.
• Coverage rolls up per scene — "6 SHOTS · 3 SETUPS", then "4/6 SHOT" as rows complete.
• Shots point at the sheet, not the scene number, so renumbering never orphans a list.

10 · STORYBOARDS & MOOD BOARDS

Frames that turn into schedulable scenes.

Frames pin to scenes in a grid. Drop images in, caption them inline, reorder them, link them to a shot. Mood boards work alongside — named boards, one to four columns, an intent note, and a PDF that renders the board as arranged rather than as a report table.

• Frames to Scenes turns a board into proposed scenes numbered SH01, SH02… each editable and excludable in review, appending only — and with no AI anywhere in that path.
• Optional generation is bring-your-own-key — you add your own image-provider key and pay that provider directly. You see the job plan and a cost estimate first, only the Generate click spends anything, Stop always works, and frames already produced always stay.
• Continuity anchors come from the breakdown, not from invention — the scene's set becomes a location anchor and its cast become character anchors, made first and passed as references to every later frame.
• Every generated frame carries a production log — request id, seed, the full prompt, and which references rode along — copyable as plain text.
• A scene born from a frame remembers it, so a shoot day's call sheet can carry a thumbnail shot-board appendix built from exactly that day's frames.

11 · CAST, CONTACTS, TASKS & FILES

The rest of the production office.

12 · THE AI LAYER

AI reads. The engine boards. You approve.

Ask a question in plain language and the model turns it into a structured query — then the engine computes the answer and hands you the underlying rows so you can check it. Talk to it about the production in a drawer, in any of the eight languages; it answers in the language you wrote in and follows you if you switch mid-thread.

• Element proposals carry their evidence — the exact source sentence and a confidence level. Approve all the high-confidence ones in one click and judge the rest yourself.
• Every proposed operation is reviewed line by line in a red/green board diff with its rationale and estimated schedule impact. One approved proposal is exactly one undo.
• A hard spend ceiling per production, checked before every paid call, with a live meter and a batch that stops the moment the ceiling is hit.
• Ask it what's happening where you shoot. You confirm the shooting base first — the story's city is not where you park the trucks — and it researches that base against your own board dates, looking for what a location manager looks for: crowds, road closures, marathons, fairs that eat every hotel room. A note without a citation is dropped; the ones that survive arrive tagged as suggestions to verify, with their source rendered, and nothing commits until you say so.

The interesting part is what it doesn't do — and none of it is a policy we promise to keep. It's how the thing is put together.

• It never writes to the board on its own. Nothing it proposes reaches your production until you approve it, and every applied change goes through the same edit path a manual change uses — as one undo step.
• It cannot do arithmetic. Answers come from a deterministic executor. Schedule impact is worked out by simulating the change on a copy and diffing the result. Every date is computed by the engine, never by the model.
• It cannot enter Auto-Schedule. The scheduling front door makes no AI calls and needs no key — no propose button, no directive box, no key field.
• It cannot guess in silence. Every breakdown decision is exactly one of three things: resolved with the line it came from, inherited from a named connected scene, or unresolved and sent to your queue.
• It cannot assert an unsourced fact. A researched note that arrives without a citation is dropped rather than shown.

Exactly four surfaces lock without a key. Everything else — import, breakdown, board, calendar, DOOD, reports, call sheets, Set Mode — works forever without one.

13 · SET MODE

What didn't get shot becomes visible debt, not a rumour.

Mark a scene shot, partial or not shot from the strip. Wrap the day and every un-shot scene drops into the Boneyard flagged OWED, carrying the day number, date and unit it fell off — so the debt reads "Day 3 (4 March, Main Unit)" rather than a bare "unscheduled". Scenes that were shot stay exactly where they are. Nothing is ever deleted.

• Partial credits zero pages. The engine will not manufacture progress out of work that wasn't verified complete.
• A shot scene is locked against rescheduling and read-only in the editor — and the refusal names the scene rather than failing quietly.
• Re-plan and the owed scenes come back as debt, while the rest of the Boneyard deliberately stays unscheduled.
• Un-wrapping never rewrites history. Scenes already dropped stay owed.
• No AI, no network, no clock reads anywhere in this layer.

14 · FOUR DISCIPLINES

Four rulebooks, not four skins.

• Feature. Holds on, drop and pickup allowed with a ten-day minimum gap, five-day week, capacity measured in page eighths.
• Episodic series. The same payroll posture, plus episode surfacing — day breaks label the episodes they shoot, a cross-boarded day reads "EP 101 · 102", and every report scopes to one episode or all of them.
• Commercial. No holds, no drop and pickup — and the day fills by time instead of pages. The day budget becomes hours, a shot's weight is its own estimate before it is anything else, and shots sharing a setup schedule as one contiguous family. If the engine has to break a setup, it says so by name.
• Documentary. Holds on, drop and pickup off, and the sort opens on location — the rolling posture.

Every one of these is a starting default, not a rule. All of it stays editable per production.

15 · ON IPAD

The board goes where the shoot goes.

Break it down on the Mac at night. Run it from the iPad on set. Same project, same engine, same file — a native Apple app on both, not a phone version of a desktop app and not a cut-down companion.

• Set Mode in your hand at video village — shot, partial, not shot, wrap the day, without walking back to the production office.
• Read the board, the Day Out of Days and tomorrow's call sheet without opening a laptop.
• It works with no signal, exactly like the Mac does.
• One purchase covers both. The AD seat is a single subscription across your Mac and your iPad, not two.

16 · EIGHT LANGUAGES

Türkçe, English, Español, Français, Italiano, Português, 日本語, 中文.

Every interface string and every tooltip is fully authored in all eight — no partial locales, no machine fallbacks. The manual is twenty-three pages, written in each language rather than translated at runtime, and it opens in whatever language the app is running in. English and Turkish ship their own screenshot sets; the other six show the English capture and say so.

• The jargon stays English everywhere. INT/EXT, DOOD and its letter codes, strip, boneyard — because that's how an international crew talks, whatever language the menus are in.
• Around four hundred tooltips, including a one-line explanation for every DOOD code, so a second AD can learn the board from the board.
• Six themes, from full night to paper white, because a hotel room at 1 a.m. and a production office at noon are not the same room.