Stripboards and the day-out-of-days: how a schedule stays honest

From breakdown to strips

Scheduling starts with a breakdown: every scene tagged for its cast, location, day or night, and the elements it needs. Each scene becomes a strip on a board — one card carrying the scene's number, its page count in eighths, and its requirements. The stripboard is that deck of scene cards, and its whole value is that strips can be reordered freely.

Ordering is the craft. Scenes group by location so the company isn't driving across town mid-day; interiors stack against weather risk; night scenes cluster; cast-heavy scenes avoid days where a performer isn't available. Each arrangement is a hypothesis about the cheapest way to shoot the script, and the board makes the cost of each hypothesis — in moves, in days, in idle time — visible before a dollar is spent.

Day breaks and page counts

Day breaks slice the strip run into shooting days. The classic planning tool is the page count: a typical shooting day covers a certain number of script pages, adjusted for the difficulty of the scenes — a dialogue scene pages faster than an action scene on a practical location.

The count is a guide, not a law. Days run long when the strips in them are heavy with elements; the honest schedule balances pages against complexity, and the board is where over-packed days get caught, because they're visible as a strip run that nobody could actually shoot in the hours available.

The day-out-of-days grid

The DOOD is the cast-side view of the same board: a grid with performers down the side and shoot days across the top, marking work, travel, wardrobe fittings and hold days. It answers the questions the stripboard can't: when does this performer work, and what are we paying for on the days between?

Hold days are where the money hides. A performer kept on the clock for a day they don't work is a day paid for waiting, and the DOOD exposes exactly how many of those days each arrangement creates. Moving one strip can collapse three hold days — the grid is how anyone notices.

• •The stripboard orders the whole production; the DOOD shows what the order costs the cast.
• •Hold days are paid waiting — the DOOD counts them per performer.
• •A better strip order shows up in the DOOD as fewer holds, not just fewer days.

One source, three documents

The stripboard, the day-out-of-days and the call sheet describe the same plan from three angles — whole production, cast, and single day. When they're maintained as separate documents, each one drifts: a strip moved on the board that never reaches the DOOD leaves cast booked for a scene that moved, and a call sheet typed by hand carries the day the board stopped being true.

The discipline is derivation. The DOOD generates from the stripboard; the call sheet takes its day from the same board. Change the order once, and all three views update from the same change.

How Clarice handles this

Clarice keeps the stripboard as the schedule's source of truth. Scenes import from a parsed script with their eighths and elements, strips reorder by drag, and day breaks define the shoot days the cast registry and DOOD derive from. A one-liner and a day-out-of-days grid read straight off the board, and each day's call sheet pulls its scenes and cast from the same strips.

Move a strip and every view moves with it — which is the entire argument for the board being a database rather than a document.