What Is a Stripboard, and How Do You Read One?

A stripboard is a scheduling tool where every scene in a film is represented by a single narrow strip carrying that scene's key information. The strips are arranged in shooting order and grouped into days, and rearranging them is how a shooting schedule gets built.

Traditionally they were strips of colored card in a wooden or metal frame, and physically moving them was the act of scheduling. Software has replaced the cardboard on most productions and has kept the metaphor exactly, because it works.

What is on a strip

Each strip is one scene, and it carries:

• Scene number, from the locked script.
• INT or EXT.
• DAY or NIGHT.
• Set or location name.
• A very short description of the scene.
• Page count in eighths.
• Cast numbers for everyone appearing in it.

All of it comes directly from the breakdown sheet. The strip is a compressed view of the breakdown, designed so that fifty of them can be read at once.

The colors

Strips are colored by the combination of interior/exterior and day/night, and the convention is close to universal:

• Yellow : exterior day
• Green : exterior night
• White : interior day
• Blue : interior night

This is the whole reason the board works as a visual tool. You do not read a stripboard, you look at it. A block of green in week three is a run of night exteriors. A board that is mostly white is a controlled interior shoot. Alternating yellow and blue within a single day is a lighting problem visible from across the room.

Why these four categories dominate scheduling is covered in day/night, int/ext.

Day breaks and banners

Two other kinds of strip sit between the scene strips.

Day breaks are the dividers marking the end of one shooting day and the start of the next. They usually carry the shoot day number, the date, and the total page count for the day above them.

Banners are strips carrying information rather than a scene: a company move, a holiday, a travel day, the start of a night block, a location change, a note that a set is being struck. They are how the board records everything that consumes time without producing footage.

Both are covered in detail in day breaks, banners, and ordering your shoot days.

Reading a board

A practiced sequence for making sense of one quickly.

Step back and look at the colors. The proportions tell you what kind of production this is and where the hard weeks are.

Find the day breaks. How many days, and how are they distributed. Look at the page count above each one and find the outliers.

Look for color changes within a day. Every switch between day and night, or interior and exterior, is a lighting transition and costs time. A day containing four color changes is usually a day someone has not thought about.

Look for location repeats. The same set name appearing in week one and week five means a return visit, which means the location has to be held or re-secured, and everything about it has to be reconstructed.

Scan the cast numbers vertically. A number appearing on days 3, 4, 19 and 30 means an actor held across a month for four days of work.

Look for banners. Company moves, travel and night transitions are where the schedule loses time invisibly.

Look at the last week. Whatever is at the end is at risk, because productions run out of time at the end.

Building with it

The rough process, covered fully in how to build a shooting schedule:

1. Make a strip for every scene.
2. Sort into location groups.
3. Within each group, split day from night.
4. Place fixed constraints first: locked location dates, actor windows, seasonal requirements.
5. Fit flexible material around them.
6. Insert day breaks, balancing page counts and difficulty.
7. Add banners for moves, travel and transitions.
8. Check for irreversible sequences and continuity traps.
9. Review cast days.
10. Rearrange, and repeat.

The last step is the job. A schedule is not built in one pass, and a board that has not been rearranged twenty times is a board nobody has interrogated.

Boards, one-liners and schedules

Three documents expressing the same decision at different resolutions.

The stripboard is the working tool for deciding the order. The one-liner is the readable summary that gets distributed. The full shooting schedule is the same order expanded with every breakdown element listed under each scene, and it is what department heads work from.

All three should be generated from the board rather than maintained separately, because the failure mode of manual scheduling is three documents that no longer agree.

Making one without software

Entirely feasible, and worth doing once if you are learning.

Physical. Index cards or strips of colored card, one per scene, on a wall or a long table. Cheap, tactile, and it works. The drawback is that it does not travel and it cannot be emailed.

Spreadsheet. One row per scene, columns for the strip fields, conditional formatting to color rows by INT/EXT and DAY/NIGHT, and a column for the assigned day. It sorts and filters, which covers most of what you need, and totals per day are a formula.

The important discipline in either case is that the board is the single source and the other documents are generated from it. Retyping the schedule into a separate one-liner is how versions diverge.

On a short film

A twenty-scene short does not need scheduling software and it does need a board.

Write each scene on a card with its number, INT/EXT, day/night, location, page count and cast. Lay them on a table. Group them by location. Split day from night. Draw a line where each shooting day ends and add up the pages above it.

That exercise takes an hour and it is the difference between a schedule and a wish. Most first-time productions discover at this point that they have planned four days of work into three, which is a much better place to discover it than on the second afternoon.

Worked example: move the strip, keep the scene number

In a fictional short, scene 4 and scene 18 both take place inside the same cafe during the day. They are far apart in story order. On the stripboard they can sit together under Monday's day break if cast, access and the practical work all fit.

Scene 18 remains scene 18 when its strip moves. The strip's place on the board tells the crew when it is planned to shoot; its scene number tells everyone which script scene to prepare. Renumbering it to match shooting order would break that connection.

Add the meal and any company move as separate banners. Then review the entire day's work, including setup changes that a page total cannot describe. The shooting-schedule guide carries this cafe example through a location change; the workflow comparison checklist helps you test the same task on paper or in software.

If you are deciding between a physical board and a digital one, we compared what each is genuinely better at. The honest answer is that most people end up using both.

Next

Having a board is not the same as having a schedule. Next: how the order actually gets decided.