Block Shooting vs Cross-Boarding: How to Choose for a Series

The two terms, in one sentence each

A block is a group of episodes produced as one unit, with one director, one prep period, and one shooting schedule. Cross-boarding is putting scenes from more than one episode on the same stripboard and ordering them together, usually by location and cast. You choose a block structure first, and then decide how far to cross-board inside it. The glossary entries for block shooting and cross-boarding have the definitions. This post works through the decision with numbers.

The example: six episodes, five locations

NIGHT DESK is a fictional six-episode half-hour series about the overnight staff at a downtown hotel. Each script runs about 32 pages. The lobby and back office are standing sets on a stage. Three locations are practicals the location manager has to book each time the company goes there.

Page counts are rounded to whole pages here to keep the comparison readable. On the real board they'd be in eighths.

A guest actor, the hotel owner (cast 9), appears in episodes 2 and 5, both times in the lobby.

Option 1: shoot each episode in order

Give each episode five days. That's 30 shoot days, and every episode has its own little schedule: stage days, then a trip to the apartment if the episode has apartment scenes, a night at the entrance, and so on.

Count the practical location visits. The entrance gets a visit in all six episodes. The apartment gets one in episodes 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6. The rooftop gets two. That's 13 separate visits to practical locations, and each one means a company move or a location day, a load-in and load-out for grip and electric, parking permits, and set dressing put up and taken down.

The owner, cast 9, works an episode 2 day and an episode 5 day about three weeks apart. On the day out of days that's two separate engagements, or a long run of hold days if the deal says he stays on.

Episode order is simplest to understand and the most forgiving when scripts arrive late. Episode 5 can still be in rewrites while episode 1 shoots, which is why many series start this way even when they'd like to cross-board.

Option 2: blocks of two, cross-boarded inside

Now group NIGHT DESK into three blocks: episodes 1 and 2, 3 and 4, 5 and 6. Each block gets one director and a board that mixes the two episodes' scenes. The producer budgets 9 days per block, 27 in total, on the theory that combining location visits saves about half a day per episode. That's an estimate to test against the board, not a rule.

Location visits drop:

The rooftop doesn't improve in blocks of two, because its scenes are in episodes 3 and 6, which land in different blocks. That's worth noticing: if the rooftop is the hardest location (a hotel that only allows access two nights a month, say), you might build the blocks as 1 and 2, 3 and 6, 4 and 5 instead. Block pairings don't have to follow episode numbers. Directors and continuity have to agree, but the board may be much better for it.

Check the apartment's day count for block 3. Episode 5 has 8 pages there and episode 6 has 4, so 12 pages. If the show plans around 6 pages a day for dialogue scenes in a practical, the apartment is two days in block 3. In episode order, it would have been about a day and a third in episode 5 and two thirds of a day in episode 6, a week apart, with the set dressing struck and rebuilt in between. Fewer visits also means fewer prep and strike days billed under the apartment's location agreement, which in this example charges $1,500 a day.

Here's what one cross-boarded day in block 3 looks like:

The day total is 1 + 2 + 1 = 4 whole pages plus 6 + 2 + 3 + 7 = 18 eighths, which is 2 2/8, for 6 2/8. Marisol (cast 1) changes clothes for three different story days in one shoot day, and the night scenes need the windows blacked out while 106-19 needs them open. The AD orders the day with the tented night scenes together and the day scene placed after lunch when the tent comes down.

Option 3: cross-board the whole season

With all six scripts locked, one board can hold all 192 pages. The practical locations become three visits. The owner's two episodes can be scheduled on consecutive lobby days, so cast 9 works two days in a row instead of two engagements three weeks apart. Vertical and short-form series often work this way, because their episodes are tiny and share the same few sets.

It has costs. The whole season has to be written before the first shoot day, which is a writers' room problem more than a scheduling one. A single director, or directors willing to share days, is needed, since a day that mixes episodes 1, 4, and 6 can't belong to three people. Continuity load goes up for costume, hair, makeup, and the script supervisor, who track story days across the entire season. And a rewrite to episode 4 in week three can pull scenes out of days that also hold episodes 2 and 6.

Choosing, based on your situation

Setting up a cross-boarded board

Prefix every scene number with the episode: 105-08, not 8. Keep one cast ID list for the whole series so Marisol is 1 in every episode. Add a story day column coded with the episode (5N1 means episode 5, night 1) so wardrobe can read it off the strip. Put a banner at the top of each block with the block number and director.

Scheduling software supports this in different ways. Movie Magic Scheduling's current version advertises multi-episode schedules and sub-boards, where each sub-board can hold a unit or an episode block with its own start date, and Episode is available as a sort field. In a spreadsheet, add an Episode column to the stripboard template and sort by location, then episode.

Storiara builds one schedule per story from that story's active script, so a cross-boarded season means working from a combined script or keeping per-episode stories side by side. Plan that before you upload anything.

On features, the words mean something slightly different

Features borrow both terms. Two back-to-back films with shared locations can be cross-boarded exactly like episodes. "Block shooting" on a single feature often means shooting all the angles in one direction across several scenes before turning the camera around, which saves relighting and asks more of the actors. The web series and vertical dramas pages cover the short-form version of the same decisions.