What Is a One-Liner Schedule?

A one-liner is a condensed shooting schedule with one line per scene, listing the scene number, whether it is interior or exterior, day or night, the set, a one-line description, the page count, and the cast involved. Days are separated by header rows. A whole feature fits in four or five pages.

It is the everyday reading version of the schedule. The stripboard is the tool you build with; the one-liner is what you hand out.

What is on it

A typical line:

47   INT   NIGHT   GARAGE - OFFICE   Maria hides the cash tin   6/8   1,4

Reading across:

Scene number. From the locked script.

INT or EXT, and DAY or NIGHT. The four letters that shape everything.

Set or location. The scripted set name, sometimes with the real location underneath.

Description. One line. Enough to identify the scene without opening the script.

Page count. In eighths.

Cast numbers. Who is in it, by number.

And between blocks of scenes, a day header:

------------------------------------------------------
DAY 12   Tuesday 15 September   GARAGE, CHURCH STREET
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Day headers usually carry the shoot day number, the date, the main location, and often a total page count for the day. Some carry sunrise and sunset times.

What it is not

Three documents get confused, and the distinction is worth holding.

The stripboard is the working tool. One strip per scene, physically or digitally rearrangeable, color coded. It is for deciding the order. Covered in what is a stripboard.

The one-liner is the readable summary of the decision. Fixed, printed, distributed, one line per scene.

The full shooting schedule is the same order expanded, with every element from the breakdown listed under each scene: every prop, costume, vehicle and effect. It runs to forty or fifty pages and is the working document for department heads.

They all express the same schedule at three levels of detail. The one-liner is the one people memorize.

What people actually use it for

Seeing the shape of the shoot. Five pages you can read in ten minutes tells you the film is 34 days, front-loaded with the garage, with a block of nights in week four and the church at the end.

Checking your own days. An actor scans for their cast number. A department head scans for the scenes they are worried about. Everyone does this within a minute of receiving it.

Answering questions on set. The one-liner is what is folded in the back pocket. When the director asks whether the office scenes are all together, the AD does not open a laptop.

Spotting problems. Reading a one-liner straight through is a surprisingly effective error check. Continuity issues stand out: a character wearing a bandage in scene 60, scheduled before the injury in scene 55, with three weeks in between.

How to read one quickly

A practiced way of scanning:

1. Read the day headers first. Locations and dates give you the geography and the rhythm. Look for repeated locations far apart, which mean return visits, and for days with more than one location, which mean company moves.
2. Scan the INT/EXT and DAY/NIGHT column vertically. Long runs of the same category are efficient. Rapid alternation between EXT DAY and INT NIGHT within one day means lighting transitions and probably an unrealistic day.
3. Look at the page totals per day. Anything much above the film's average is a day to ask about.
4. Scan cast numbers. A number appearing on days 3, 4, 17 and 31 means an actor held for a month for four days of work, which is a real cost and sometimes an avoidable one.
5. Look at the last day. Productions run out of time at the end, so whatever is scheduled last is at risk. If something essential is there, raise it now.

The header block

The top of a one-liner carries the production title, the schedule version and date, and often a legend for the cast numbers.

The version matters as much as it does with script revisions. Schedules change constantly during pre-production, and a crew member working from last week's version is a real problem. Every reissue should carry a new date and, ideally, a version number, and be accompanied by a short note saying what changed.

Never distribute a one-liner without a date on every page. People print them, and printed schedules outlive their accuracy.

Building one

You do not write a one-liner from scratch. It is generated from the scheduled stripboard, which is generated from the breakdown.

If you are working by hand in a spreadsheet, keep the scene data in one sheet and the day assignment as a column, so that the one-liner is a sorted view rather than a retyped document. The failure mode of manual scheduling is having the same information in three places and updating two of them.

On a small production

A short film schedule fits on one page and you should still make it.

The value is not the format, it is the discipline of assigning every scene to a day and totalling the pages. Most first-time schedules fall apart because somebody assumed the day would hold nine scenes and never added up what nine scenes actually were.

The minimum useful version: one line per scene, grouped under day headers, with page counts totalled per day and cast listed. That is the whole thing, and it will tell you within twenty minutes whether your three-day shoot is actually a four-day shoot.

Next

You have the schedule as a document. Next: the reason it looks nothing like the script, and the logic behind shooting a film in an order no audience will ever see.