The standard key, and why it's built on two questions
Almost every board you'll be handed uses some version of this legend:
| Strip color | I/E | D/N |
|---|---|---|
| White | INT | Day |
| Yellow | EXT | Day |
| Blue | INT | Night |
| Green | EXT | Night |
| Black (or dark gray) | Day break | |
| A color not used above | Banner (move, day off, note) |
The colors answer the two questions that change a shoot day the most. Interior or exterior tells you whether weather and daylight can stop you. Day or night tells you what time the crew is called, how big the lighting package is, and what happens to turnaround the next day. Cast, pages, and location are printed on the strip as text. The color is there so you can read a whole week from across the room.
The stripboard color legend lists the variations people use. Where boards really differ is in the scenes that don't fall neatly into four boxes.
Coloring the scenes that don't fit
Scripts have plenty of headings that aren't plain DAY or NIGHT. Here's how to handle the common ones on a fictional feature, DRY COUNTY.
| Scene heading | Strip | Why |
|---|---|---|
| EXT. GRAIN ELEVATOR - DAWN | Green, D/N field "DAWN" | The scene needs pre-sunrise light, so it's scheduled like night work with a hard end time |
| EXT. HIGHWAY 54 - MAGIC HOUR | Yellow, D/N field "DUSK" | Shot in daylight hours against a fixed sunset window |
| INT./EXT. SHERIFF'S TRUCK (MOVING) - DAY | Yellow | Weather and light matter as much as outside, so treat it as an exterior |
| INT. MOTEL ROOM - NIGHT (shot on a tented set at 2:00P) | Blue, note "TENTED" | The audience sees night; the note tells grip and electric about the tent |
| EXT. MAIN STREET - NIGHT (shot day for night) | Green, note "DFN" | Plays as night; the note explains why it sits in the middle of a day |
| INT. COURTHOUSE - CONTINUOUS | Same as the scene it continues | CONTINUOUS isn't a time of day. Look back to the last real one |
| INSERT. PHONE SCREEN | White unless it's clearly night | Inserts often go to a splinter unit; label them so they don't get lost in a day |
The rule underneath all of these: color the strip by how the scene reads on screen, and put how it gets shot in the notes or an element field. If you color the tented motel room white because it shoots in daylight, the 1st AD scanning for night work will miss it, and the costume department tracking the night-before-the-trial wardrobe will see a day scene.
Dawn and dusk are where productions disagree most. Some boards give them a fifth color, often orange or pink. If you do that, make it a color nobody else on the board is using, and never pink if the script is on pink revision pages that week. People will mix them up.
What a week of colors tells you
Here's week 2 of DRY COUNTY, reading down the board. The color column is what you'd see at a glance.
| Color | Sc. | Set | D/N | Pgs | Cast |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| White | 31 | INT. SHERIFF'S OFFICE | D | 2 2/8 | 1, 4 |
| White | 33 | INT. SHERIFF'S OFFICE | D | 1 5/8 | 1, 4, 7 |
| Yellow | 34 | EXT. SHERIFF'S OFFICE | D | 6/8 | 1 |
| Black | END OF DAY 6 | 4 5/8 | |||
| Yellow | 40 | EXT. HIGHWAY 54 | D | 1 3/8 | 1, 2 |
| Yellow | 41 | INT./EXT. SHERIFF'S TRUCK (MOVING) | D | 2 | 1, 2 |
| Black | END OF DAY 7 | 3 3/8 | |||
| Blue | 52 | INT. MOTEL ROOM | N | 1 6/8 | 2, 3 |
| Green | 53 | EXT. MOTEL PARKING LOT | N | 2 1/8 | 2, 3, 5 |
| Black | END OF DAY 8 | 3 7/8 | |||
| Green | 55 | EXT. GRAIN ELEVATOR | N | 2 4/8 | 1, 2, 3 |
| Green | 56 | EXT. GRAIN ELEVATOR | DAWN | 4/8 | 1, 3 |
| Black | END OF DAY 9 | 3 | |||
| Yellow | 60 | EXT. FAIRGROUNDS | D | 3 1/8 | 1, 4, 6 |
| Black | END OF DAY 10 | 3 1/8 |
Check one total so you trust the rest: Day 6 is 2 2/8 + 1 5/8 + 6/8. Whole pages 2 + 1 = 3, eighths 2 + 5 + 6 = 13, which is 1 5/8, so 4 5/8.
Now read the colors. Day 7 is all yellow, and one of the scenes is a moving truck, so that day depends on weather and has a lot of rigging for 3 3/8 pages. It needs a cover set; the white sheriff's office strips from Day 6 would have been the obvious cover, but they're already shot.
Days 8 and 9 are blue and green. That's the night block. Day 9 ends on a dawn scene, so the unit wraps near sunrise on the grain elevator. Day 10 is a yellow day exterior at the fairgrounds, and it follows directly. Cast 1 finishes on the dawn scene and needs a rest period before a fairgrounds call; with a 12-hour rest from a 7:30A dismissal, the earliest call is 7:30P. The colors told you in about two seconds that this week doesn't work. The fix is to put Day 10 after the weekend, or make Day 10 a night day and push the fairgrounds.
Reading scene numbers alone, you'd have to think through every line to find that. Green followed by yellow shows it right away. How to read a stripboard walks through the rest of what a board tells you line by line.
Setting up the colors in your tool
In a spreadsheet, keep a column that says the color in words and fill the row to match. The stripboard template is built that way. A conditional formatting rule that looks at the I/E and D/N columns will fill rows for you: INT and D gives white, EXT and D gives yellow, and so on. Add a fifth rule for DAWN and DUSK if you use one.
In Movie Magic Scheduling, strip colors live in the Strip Designer, on the Strip Colors tab, where you pick a background color for each time of day. The documentation on strip display also covers font color and the separate color setting for day break strips. Because the color keys off the time-of-day value, a scene with a typo like "NIGTH" in that field won't get a night color. Fix the breakdown sheet, not the strip.
Whatever the tool, print the legend on the first page of the board and the schedule. A crew member coming from a show that used orange for dusk will otherwise read your orange banners as dusk scenes.
Colors that aren't strip colors
Three color systems live in the same production office, and new coordinators mix them up:
| System | What the colors mark | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| Strip colors | INT or EXT, day or night | This page, stripboard |
| Revision colors | Which draft a script page is from (white, blue, pink, and on) | Revision colors |
| Breakdown color codes | Element types when tagging a script (cast, props, stunts) | Breakdown color codes |
When someone says "the blue ones," ask which system they mean. "The blue pages" and "the blue strips" are completely different problems.
When the colors disappear
A lot of schedules get printed on an office copier, and in grayscale white and yellow come out the same. Blue and green are also close for crew members with red-green color blindness. Two habits handle both. Always print I/E and D/N as text on every strip, and make day breaks and banners visibly different in shape or weight (a thick black bar, a full-width text banner) so they read without color. That way the color speeds up reading, and nothing is lost when a copy comes out gray.
In Storiara
Storiara's schedule shows INT or EXT and day or night on each strip, pulled from the scene headings in the uploaded script, so those fields are filled before you start dragging scenes into days. The schedule prints from the browser, which means the same grayscale advice applies to any copy you run off.