NightShift First AD · Mac & iPad
FILM SCHEDULING
THAT BOARDS
A SHOW
LIKE A 1st AD.
Drop in the script. Get a breakdown, a stripboard, a Day Out of Days and a call sheet, built the way you'd build them. Native on your Mac and iPad, with no internet and no account. AI-assisted, AD-approved.
You still finish it by hand
The breakdown takes days. The board takes nights. Then the director moves one scene and you rebuild the week, at midnight, in Excel, on a laptop in a hotel room with no signal. First AD takes the load off that and leaves the call with you. Nothing goes out that you haven't approved.
- 2,008Tests
- 0Failures
- 17Sections
- 14Reports
- 8Languages
- 0Servers
Every build runs all of the tests. If the scheduling logic drifts, the build fails.
A breakdown you check, not type.
/01Import the PDF, the one that actually lands in your inbox, or Final Draft, Fountain or plain text. Speaking cast come from the dialogue cues, elements from a built-in lexicon, and day and night are resolved through CONTINUOUS and SAME chains. Every candidate shows you the line it came from, so you're checking, not retyping. No key, no cloud.
- /01
Real page eighths
"2 4/8", "12/8" and "2" all parse, and bad input is refused with a worked example. Integer eighths from the field to the day total, so a day's pages can't drift by a rounding error.
- /02
Thirty-three categories
The 24 the industry has used for decades, in the order you know them, plus nine modern ones, from intimacy coordinator to drones. Anything you mark hazardous red-flags itself on the sheet and in every report.
- /03
One person, once
Type "Det. Morgan" when DETECTIVE MORGAN exists and it offers to link, not to create. Rename once and every scene, link and flag follows.
- /04
Practical location
Its own field, separate from the slugline: the one real address the company parks at. The engine clusters on it, so a set name that drifts across ninety headings stops splitting into ninety locations.
- /05
The Script Doctor
A free, offline scan reads the draft before it poisons the board: missing and duplicate scene numbers, malformed sluglines, set-name drift, a day or night that's silent. Accept one fix or all of them, as one tracked revision.
- /06
New pages don't wipe your work
Compare any two drafts. Scenes are matched by content, not by number, so a renumbered scene keeps everything linked to it, and a removed one retires with a recoverable tombstone.
Script in. Board out. Same afternoon.
/02- 01 PDF · FDX · Fountain
Import
PDF, Final Draft, Fountain or plain text. Imported scenes land in the Boneyard: an import never silently fills a working schedule.
- 02 Offline
The Script Doctor
Real screenplays arrive broken. A free scan reports what will hurt you later, each finding anchored to the line it came from.
- 03 You verify
Breakdown
One sheet per scene with the script beside it. Select a phrase, pick a category, and the element lands on the sheet.
- 04 No AI
Three questions
How many shoot days, how many days a week, and when you start. The number you give is absolute.
- 05 Industry colours
The board
Strips you read by colour, day breaks that total scenes, pages and hours, and a Boneyard where nothing is ever deleted.
- 06 Derived
Day Out of Days
Calculated from the board every time you look at it. Never hand-entered, so it can never disagree with the board.
- 07 Real dates
Calendar
Month or week, per unit, with fittings, holidays, travel and company moves, and sun times worked out on your Mac.
- 08 PDF · XLSX · CSV
Fourteen reports
All from one model, so the PDF, the spreadsheet and the CSV can't drift from each other.
- 09 You press send
Call sheet
Assembled from the board, finished by hand, and sent from your own email account only once you approve it.
How it boards.
/03Three questions in, a deterministic plan out, arriving as a proposal you approve, edit or reject. Say thirty-five days and you get exactly thirty-five, or an honest note telling you that realistic is forty-one, and what hitting your number cost. It will never quietly hand you back a longer schedule.
- 01
Child labour hours never bend
A minor's legal working hours sit at the top, and nothing is allowed to break them: not a day target, not a location block, not a night belt.
- 02
The day target is a promise
If the material won't fit, it force-fits your number and shows both, with the average pages per day against the normal band. It merges whole adjacent days rather than split a block to make a number look tidy.
- 03
Continuity before geography
The intact piggy bank shoots before the broken one. A wound gets days to age. Stunts, animals, effects and intimacy are spread across the schedule instead of piling onto one unlucky Tuesday.
- 04
Location families, not sluglines
Ninety sluglines are often thirty-five real addresses. It works out which are the same practical place and keeps that place in one block. The bathroom belongs to the hotel.
- 05
Turnaround runs on the clock
Wrap is estimated from the night share of the day and measured against the next call. If your day count makes a breach unavoidable, it holds your number and shows you exactly where the rest period breaks.
- 06
A day is setups, not only eighths
Setup load counts against the day's cap too, and a scene's declared crowd weighs in, because a crowd means many setups and many setups mean a slow day.
- 07
The sun only moves one way
Days first, nights last, interiors before exteriors. A built interior floats, because you control the light; an exterior is pinned to the real sky. Car interiors go anywhere and never cost a company move.
- 08
Nights gather into a belt
Grouped and ramped toward Friday, so the weekend absorbs the turnaround and the crew flips into nights once instead of five times. Never a night Monday into a day Tuesday.
It promises a strong first draft, not a hundred per cent. The final word is always yours.
There is no AI in this part at all. The panel says so on its own face: it runs on this Mac, with no internet and no API key.
It tells you what it traded.
Every schedule is a set of compromises, and 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. It advises. You decide.
- Turnaround breach
- A day straight after a night
- Exterior off its day or night
- Connected sequence split
- Irreversible prop out of order
- Interior split across visits
- Minor on a night or a long day
- Calendar drift
- Location block broken
A Day Out of Days that can't go stale.
/04- 01Derived, never storedMove a strip and it has already changed
- 02Any categoryCast, stunts, vehicles, animals, or your own
- 03The standard codesS · SW · W · WF · SWF · H · D · PW · TR · FT · R · M
- 04Your payroll postureHolds · drop to pickup · minimum gap
- 05Conflicts where they areOn the name, on the cells, one click to the strip
Fourteen reports. One model.
/05Options 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. The spreadsheet is a real workbook the UPM can sort and cost from, and every page carries your company name and logo.
Call sheets · /06
The call sheet fills itself in.
Twelve blocks in the printed sheet's own order, filled from the board and from your own data: the day's scenes and pages, the cast grid with each status letter taken from the Day Out of Days, the advance from the next shoot day. Sunrise and sunset are computed on your Mac, weather comes from a free public service with no account, and the nearest hospital resolves from the first location. Every machine-filled value wears a dot, and every one of them is yours to edit.
Sending has no server in the path. Mail leaves your Mac through your own email account, one message per recipient so a crew list never leaks across the crew, and only after a dialog that names the file and the exact recipient count. What you previewed is what goes out.
The AI layer · /07
AI reads. The engine boards. You approve.
AI reads
Ask in plain language, in any of the eight languages, and the model turns it into a structured query. Element proposals carry the exact source sentence and a confidence level.
The engine boards
The engine computes the answer and hands you the rows behind it. Schedule impact comes from simulating the change on a copy. Every date comes from the engine, never from the model.
You approve
Every proposed change is reviewed line by line in a red and green board diff, with its rationale and estimated impact. One approved proposal is exactly one undo.
The interesting part is what it doesn't do. None of it is a policy we promise to keep. It's how the thing is put together.
- 01
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.
- 02
It cannot do the arithmetic
Answers come from a deterministic executor, and every date is computed by the engine.
- 03
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.
- 04
It cannot guess in silence
Every breakdown decision is resolved with the line it came from, inherited from a named connected scene, or sent to your queue as unresolved.
- 05
It cannot assert an unsourced fact
Ask what's happening where you shoot, and a researched note that arrives without a citation is dropped rather than shown.
A hard spend ceiling per production is checked before every paid call. Exactly four surfaces lock without a key; import, breakdown, board, calendar, Day Out of Days, reports, call sheets and Set Mode work forever without one.
A frame for every shot.
/08Pick a scene and it drafts the shot list from the script: how many shots, and for each one its size, angle, movement, subject and the reason it exists. Approve the rows you want and every shot gets its own storyboard frame. Then one click renders the whole scene, frame by frame, with the scene's characters and location carried into every one of them.
- /01
Shot list from the script
Drafted by the same craft engine as Director Studio, reading that scene's text and breakdown. The rows land in a review list, and nothing enters the shot list until you apply it. A photo of a handwritten shot list works too.
- /02
Continuity first
The scene's set becomes a location reference and its cast become character references. They're made once, before any frame, and passed to every later frame that needs them.
- /03
The price before the click
You see the job plan and the cost estimate first, at 1K, 2K or 4K. Only the Generate click spends anything, on your own image-provider key, Stop always works, and frames already made always stay.
- /04
Every frame keeps its log
Request id, seed, the full prompt and the references that rode along, copyable as plain text.
- /05
Linked both ways
The frame sits on its shot's row and the shot on its frame. Shots point at the sheet, not the scene number, so a renumbered scene orphans nothing.
- /06
Onto the call sheet
A shoot day's call sheet can carry that day's frames as a shot-board appendix.
The board goes where the shoot goes.
/09- /01
Set Mode
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, with the day, date and unit it fell off. Visible debt, not a rumour.
- /02
iPad, natively
Break it down on the Mac at night, run it from the iPad on set. Same project, same engine, same file, and no signal needed. One subscription covers both.
- /03
The rest of the office
Cast and contacts whose availability reaches the conflict engine, tasks bound to shoot days, mood boards, and a files hub that never deletes.
Four rulebooks, not four skins
Pages and holds
Holds on, drop and pickup with a ten-day minimum gap, a five-day week, capacity in page eighths.
Episodes on the board
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.
The day fills by time
No holds, no drop and pickup. The day budget becomes hours, and shots sharing a setup are scheduled as one family. If the engine has to break a setup, it says so by name.
The rolling posture
Holds on, drop and pickup off, and the sort opens on location. Every default stays editable per production.
8 languages, every string and tooltip written in each. The jargon stays English.
- English
- Türkçe
- Español
- Français
- Italiano
- Português
- 日本語
- 中文
Privacy · /10
No account. No server. No upload.
Your script and your schedule stay on your Mac. There's no login, no cloud project store and nothing to sync, which also means it works at basecamp with no signal, on a plane, in a hotel room at one in the morning. Import, breakdown, schedule, reports and call sheets all run with no internet and no API key.
If you switch the AI features on, they run on your own key, kept in your Mac's Keychain. We have no backend, so your key never reaches us. What each feature sends, and to whom, is written out in our privacy policy.
Built by a 1st AD, not about one
Every rule in the engine came off a real board.
Oğulcan Köyler was the sole main-unit 1st AD on The Persian Version (2023, dir. Maryam Keshavarz), which won the Audience Award (U.S. Dramatic) at Sundance. First AD is his method, written down.
It's engineered like software people sign documents with. One of its 2,008 tests is a real hundred-and-ten-scene feature and the board a working 1st AD built for it by hand. It has also been through an adversarial security audit, including a red-team pass whose only job was to break our own fixes.
What you need. Who pays.
/11- MAC
- macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on an Apple silicon Mac.
- IPAD
- iPadOS 17 or later.One app, one subscription.
- INTERNET
- Not required.Weather, sunrise lookups and the optional AI features are the only things that use a connection.
- ACCOUNT
- None. No sign-up, no cloud project store.
- AI KEY
- Optional.Your own provider key, in your device's Keychain.
- IMPORTS
- PDF, Final Draft (.fdx), Fountain and plain text.
- EXPORTS
- PDF, spreadsheet and CSV, with your logo on every page.
Viewer
Free
FOREVER · NO ACCOUNT
- Open any project and read all of it: board, calendar, Day Out of Days, reports, call sheets
- Search, filter and navigate
- No editing, exporting or printing
AD seat
Subscription
PER PERSON · PRICE AT LAUNCH
- Every editing tool, and the scheduling engine
- Export and print all fourteen reports
- Build, brand and send call sheets
- The optional AI layer, on your own key
One person builds the schedule and everybody else reads it, for nothing. It will be sold through the App Store as a monthly subscription with a free trial, managed from your own App Store account. When a subscription ends, nothing locks: the app drops back to Viewer and your projects stay yours.
Access
Board your next show.
First AD is finished software that hasn't shipped publicly yet.
It isn't on the App Store, there's no public download, and we're not selling it yet. A scheduling tool earns trust on a board that actually got shot, not on a website. If you run boards for a living, write to us.
First AD is a separate product from Director Studio, our AI production studio.