Starting a Project & Importing a Screenplay

Welcome to the FilmBase Getting Started guide. Throughout this practical series, we follow a real short film production called Dead Tired step by step.

In this first episode, you will learn how to create your production project and import your screenplay so FilmBase can build the central source of truth for your schedule, breakdown, and budget.

The finished project is in the download too. It has no password on it, so you can open it in FilmBase and dig around a completed production — the board, the budget, the Day out of Days and the call sheets, all filled in. Follow along and build it yourself, or open the finished one and take it apart. Both work.

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Step 1: Create a New Project in Project Hub

When you launch FilmBase, the Project Hub opens displaying all your local productions.

1. Click the New Project button in the top right.
2. In the Create New Project dialog, enter Dead Tired into the Project Name field.

Look at the two options underneath before you create it:

• Master Password is per project. Leave it empty and the project opens with your account password, the one you set during installation. Type a different one and only that password opens this project — what you want when you are handing the file to somebody and would rather not give them the password to everything else you have made.
• Share this project freely (no password) drops the password altogether, so the file opens on any FilmBase install. Useful for passing a project around, worth skipping for anything sensitive.

3. For Dead Tired, tick Share this project freely — this is the project we hand out for you to follow along with, and a password on it would only be something to get wrong. On your own productions, leave it unticked.
4. Click Create Project.

FilmBase creates a dedicated folder named Dead Tired directly on your computer’s local drive. All script edits, stripboard schedules, call sheets, and budget files stay saved locally in this folder.

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Step 2: Understand the Main UI Layout

Once you have the pattern here, you will not get lost in the app.

• Top navigation bar — each tab is a major area: Budget, Schedule, Script, Export, Cast & Crew, and Team.
• Left sidebar — changes to show the pages inside whichever tab is active. Click Schedule and the sidebar offers Stripboards, Call Sheets, the Shoot Schedule, the Day out of Days, Locations and more.

That is the whole navigation model: the top bar picks the area, the sidebar picks the page inside it. When you are not sure where something lives, start with the tab it most likely belongs to and scan the sidebar. The arrow at the top of the sidebar collapses it for more working space.

Two more things worth knowing now, because both come up throughout the series:

• Page toolbars run along the top of most pages, holding the tools for that page. When you are hunting for an action, look there first.
• The inspector panel on the right of many pages shows the details and settings of whatever you have selected.

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Step 3: Import Your Final Draft Screenplay

To import your screenplay:

1. Click Schedule in the top navigation bar.
2. Select Stripboards in the left sidebar.
3. Because this is a brand new project, the page displays a “No Script Imported” overlay with three buttons in the center: Import Script, Use Existing Script, and Create Script. Click Import Script.
4. Click Choose File in the left panel of the import dialog, and select Dead Tired.fdx from the Scripts folder of the demo pack. (Use the Download the project files link at the top of this page if you haven’t already grabbed it.)
5. The right panel populates with a preview list of all 30 scenes. All scenes are checked by default, but you can uncheck any scene if you wish to omit it before importing.
6. Click Import.

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Step 4: Explore Your Interactive Scene Strips

FilmBase reads Final Draft .fdx files and PDF screenplays, turning the traditional 1st AD stripboard into color-coded scene strips.

A stripboard is the 1st AD’s planning tool: every scene becomes a single movable strip, so you can reorder an entire shoot by dragging rows rather than rewriting a schedule. Each strip displays its scene number, heading, exact length in eighths of a page, cast IDs, and assigned locations. FilmBase extracts all of that from the screenplay automatically, along with location names, interior/exterior tags, day/night designations, and character rosters.

Why your strips are colored by location

Out of the box, FilmBase gives every location its own color. Scroll the board and you will see it immediately: all the Gran’s House scenes share one color, the corner shop scenes share another, the woods scenes another again.

That is not decoration. Grouping a shoot by location is most of what scheduling a film is, because every move between locations costs you shooting hours. Coloring by location means you can see how well grouped your board is without reading a single scene heading, and in the next episode you will watch those colors visibly clump together as the optimizer runs. A board that starts as a scattered mess of colors and ends up in solid blocks is the optimizer doing its job.

Switching to the traditional board colors

If you would rather have the classic production board, open the stripboard settings and switch the color mode to Industry Standard. Colors then follow interior/exterior and time of day instead of location:

• White: Interior day scenes
• Yellow: Exterior day scenes
• Blue: Interior night scenes
• Green: Exterior night scenes
• Orange: Dawn, dusk, magic hour, twilight, sunrise, and sunset scenes

Dead Tired has an orange strip waiting for you at Scene 7, EXT. SUBURBAN STREET - DAWN. Either way, you can override any individual strip’s color by hand.

For this series we will stay on the default, because location grouping is exactly what we are about to optimize for.