Film Scheduling: Stripboard & Schedule Optimizer

In this episode, we will set our shoot duration and select calendar dates for Dead Tired, and use FilmBase’s schedule optimizer to automatically arrange our scenes into a balanced five-day shoot schedule. For the wider picture of what FilmBase’s film scheduling software does, start there.

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Step 1: Set Shoot Duration and Select Calendar Dates

Before running the optimizer, you establish the target shooting container and real production calendar dates:

Before you set anything, look at the toolbar across the top of the window, because two controls up there belong together.

The block selector already reads Block 1. A block is one shooting unit: it has its own shoot days, its own board, and its own script if you need one. Your project came with Block 1 already in it, and plenty of productions never need a second.

You add more when the shoot genuinely splits — an episodic show where each episode is its own block, a second unit working in parallel, or a production shooting one leg in one city and the rest somewhere else. Each block schedules independently, and you switch between them from this selector. Dead Tired is a five-day short, so one is all we need.

Next to it is the Shoot Days field, and this is the part worth holding on to: the days you set there belong to whichever block is selected. That is why, once we reach globals and fringes, the budget’s shoot-day count is named after the block.

1. In the toolbar, click into the Shoot Days field and enter 5.
2. Select Shoot Schedule in the left sidebar under Schedule to open the calendar grid.
3. Click October 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 on the calendar.

FilmBase assigns those dates to your five shoot days and orders them chronologically. Real dates are what cast availability, location bookings, call sheets and budget payroll dates all get checked against.

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Step 2: Open the Optimizer and Choose Its Priority

1. Select Stripboards in the left sidebar under Schedule to return to your stripboard.
2. In the top toolbar, click Optimize to open the optimizer panel in the right inspector.

It is worth knowing what it works from before you change anything. For every scene it reads where it takes place, who is in it, how many pages it covers, and whether it plays day or night. Then it arranges those scenes across your shoot days to cut wasted moves, instead of sending the whole company back to Gran’s house four separate times in a week.

The three priority presets

At the top of the panel are three presets deciding what the optimizer treats as most important:

Preset	What it does
Locations	Minimizes company moves — shoot out each location before going anywhere else
Balanced	Weighs locations, actors, and page counts equally
Actors	Consolidates cast work days — each performer is on set for fewer days

Balanced is the default, and it is the right choice for most productions, because the other two each buy one thing at the other’s expense. Optimize hard for locations and you can strand an actor across the whole week; optimize hard for actors and you pay for it in company moves. Pick one of those only when you know which side your production is losing money on.

The presets are shortcuts for the sliders underneath them. Drag any slider yourself and the preset changes to Custom. We will stay on Balanced.

Keep Day/Night Separate

3. Under Scheduling rules, switch off the Keep Day/Night Separate toggle.

That toggle is on by default for a good reason: a crew that wraps at three in the morning cannot legally or humanely be back on set at seven, so mixing day and night work on one shoot day is how productions run into turnaround penalties. On a feature you would almost certainly leave it on. We are shooting Dead Tired day for night, using camera filters and blackout curtains inside studios, so the constraint does not apply to us and night scenes are free to share a day with daytime scenes.

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Step 3: Optimize the Board

Lower down the panel is Solve Time. It sets how long the optimizer is allowed to search, so a longer setting gives it more time to work and can improve what it comes back with. The default is usually fine.

4. Leave Solve Time alone and click Optimize Schedule at the top of the panel.

A progress bar runs while it works. Within a few seconds, FilmBase reorders your strips into five balanced shoot days:

• Every scene at Gran’s House is grouped together onto the same shoot day.
• The woods scenes land together on another.
• Corner shop scenes sit consecutively to eliminate unnecessary location moves.
• Total page counts for each day are rebalanced to prevent overbooking crew work hours.

Watch the colors while this happens. Your board went in as a scattered mix and comes out in solid blocks of color, one block per location, which you can read off the board without opening a single scene.

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Step 4: Availability Is a Hard Rule

Read the line under the Optimize Schedule button:

Cast & location availability and minimum turnaround are always respected.

Those are not preferences you can switch off. They are hard rules, and the optimizer will fail to find a schedule before it breaks one.

There is nothing for it to respect yet, though. Cast availability lives on a contact, and location availability lives on a real-world location, and we have made neither. Episode 5 creates the cast and blocks out a date for an actor; Episode 10 does the same for a location. In both you will run this optimizer again and watch scenes move off the blocked days on their own.

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Step 5: Drag, Reorder, and Lock Strips

The automated schedule is completely flexible. Click and drag any scene strip up or down to move it between shoot days. The surrounding strips shift smoothly, and total page counts for both affected days update instantly.

You are never stuck with what the optimizer gives you either. Right-click any strip and choose Lock to Day, and a padlock appears on it. Run the optimizer again and it schedules everything else around that scene rather than moving it. Right-click a day header instead and Lock Day does the same for every strip on that day.

That is how you keep the one thing you have already committed to — a location you have booked, or a day an actor has flown in for — while letting the optimizer rearrange the rest.