How to Use a Stripboard

1. Intro

Hi, I’m Chris from StudioBinder, and this is a guided walkthrough of the stripboard page.

With this stripboard functionality you can easily import screenplays, create shooting schedules, and seamlessly transition them to call sheets.

By setting up a shooting schedule within StudioBinder, your team can better plan and prepare your shoots, which means a smoother production experience with less surprises.

So let’s take a look at it right now.

2: Getting Started

Getting started with a stripboard is incredibly easy and fast.

If you have a script, you can just click this button, and drag-and-drop your Final Draft script right in.

In just a few seconds, all of your script details will be imported. Scene information, script locations, characters, page counts, and more.

As you can see, strips are automatically color-coded by industry standards.

If you want to add or edit a scene manually, you can do that as well.

If you click here, you can see a preview of the scene in script format…or click here to read the screenplay in its entirety.

It literally takes seconds to add everything and get the ball rolling.

3: Assigning Cast & Locations to Shooting Schedules

So now that we have a script imported, I want to show you how easy it is to create a shooting schedule.

First let’s assign our talent and shooting locations.

Characters are automatically assigned to a scene if they have dialogue.

But many times you have non-speaking characters in a scene, so we made it easy to assign more.

• just click here to see all the imported characters…
• …and select the ones you want to add…
• And click away…done.

Assigning a shooting location works the same way, just click on the column…

• …and select a location.
• …If you want to add a new location, just click here.
• I’ll label this one “La Sirenita”…
• …and search for an address…
• …and click “Create”

…and now you can see the shooting location has been immediately assigned to the scene.

4: How to Reorder a Shooting Schedule

Reordering scenes couldn’t be easier.

Just select a strip, and drag.

We also built in an auto-reordering feature to group scenes based on criteria of your choice. This turbo-charges the workflow and gets you pretty close to the finish line in seconds.

Just click the “Reorder” button up here…

• …and then select your sorting criteria.
• If you’ve already assigned locations to your scenes by this point, we suggest setting “Shooting Location” as the initial sorting since it’ll group all of your scenes by their respective locations. If you don’t have shooting locations assigned yet, then select “Script Location”, which sorts by scene headings.
• You also have the option to set secondary sorting. I’ll just disable these for now…
• If you look down here, you also have the option to add Day Breaks. Day Breaks mark the end of a shooting day. I’ll go ahead and enable this…
• …and set it to add a Day Break every 6 pages…
• …and then click “Reorder Stripboard.”

So with just a few clicks, the entire stripboard is automatically ordered for me by shooting location WITH Day Breaks added every 6 pages.

So all you would need to do now is finetune the ordering as you see fit.

As I do that, you can see the day breaks automatically update the day and page counts.

To help speed up this process even further, we developed cut-and-paste hot keys, so you can move large groups of strips, or even entire days, in an instant. Just select some strips…

• …hit CMD-X….
• …select the strip I want to paste the scenes under…
• …and hit CMD-V to paste.  Done.

5: Banners

You can also specify important notes on your stripboard using Banners.

So for example, if you look here, you can see that halfway through this shoot day, my shooting location changes. The time to move between locations should be factored into my schedule. To emphasize this, I can add a banner and label it, Company Move.

Just click here…

• …and select “Add Banner Under”…
• …then type in a description…in this case “Company Move to La Sirenita…”
• …and then, click “Create.”

…and now you see the banner has been added to the stripboard, making it clear that we should allot enough time for this move.

This is really useful for drawing awareness around time-consuming events such as moves, meal breaks, and extended prep times.

Our approach to stripboards is to automate the technicals so that you are freed up to focus on the creative and strategy.

6: Managing a Stripboard Elements

Sometimes scripts are not formatted correctly, and require some revisions after import, so we made it easy to manage characters and script locations.

You can click here to view a full list of all the characters or locations imported.

If I click characters…

…I can see there are 2 Stuarts imported (one of which had a typo in the script).

No worries, you can easily correct this by merging both characters. This will merge all of their scenes under a new character.

To do that, select the characters…

• …then click the “Merge” button…
• …type in the name of the new character…in this case “Stuart”…
• …confirm the CAST ID…in this case 1.
• …and then hit apply.

As you can see, the two characters have been merged.

While I’m here, I’m also going to change the Cast ID of our character “Claire,” to #2.

To do that, I just drag her row up to the 2nd position, and you can see Claire’s ID updates to the number “2.”

To confirm the changes, I’ll go back to the stripboard…

• …and click on the CAST column…
• I can now see Stuart has been merged…..
• …and Claire now has the cast ID “2.”

As you can see, we provide powerful tools for you to be able to correct any formatting errors that may have resulted from the way a script was written.

Just make the changes, and the stripboard will be updated immediately.

7: Version Tracking

Another powerful feature is version tracking.

Let’s say you worked on a stripboard and the screenwriter just sent you a new version of the script. You want to import it to see what it looks like, but you don’t want to lose your previous work.

No problem. You can roll back to previous versions of a stripboard at any time.

Just import the new script…

…after importing, you’ll see the new stripboard.

To swap to the previous version, just click here…

• …and you’ll see all the previous imports…
• …find the version you want to roll back to…
• … and then click the “Make Current” button.

…aaand I’ve rolled back to my previous stripboard, including its associated characters and locations.

We’ve made it incredibly easy to swap back and forth between different versions of a stripboard so you never need to worry about losing important data.

You can just roll back in seconds and you can see your work is safe and sound.

8: Spinning off a Call Sheet from the Shooting Schedule

The last feature I want to discuss is all about call sheets.

Let’s say you’ve worked hard to put together a detailed stripboard.

Now you’re heading into production and need to start creating call sheets.

Wouldn’t it be nice to import your schedule right in?

Well, we’ve thought of that too. Just go to your stripboard…

• …and click on the Plus icon found on every Day Break. This will spin off a new call sheet with all of this day’s scenes.
• …after clicking the button…you can see the date is added for me..and if go to the call sheet preview…
• …I can see my Day Out of Days is filled in…if i scroll down a bit…
• …the shooting locations were added as well..
• …and below that, I see all of my scenes, banners, and page counts…
• …if i scroll down some more, I can see that even the “Advance Schedule” for the next day has been added too…with the corresponding Day Out of Days and Date.

…all of this was achieved by clicking a plus icon.

9: Conclusion

This release demonstrates a major shift towards the pre-production process.

Our goal is to create a holistic workflow that seamlessly transitions from script to scheduling to call sheets.

Now all of these updates are just the tip of the iceberg of things to come…

….but until then, thank you for watching and let us know what you think on our Facebook page.