The common scheme
This is the set most film schools teach and most paper breakdowns use:
| Element | Mark |
|---|---|
| Cast (speaking) | Red |
| Stunts | Orange |
| Silent bits / featured extras | Yellow |
| Background actors (atmosphere) | Green |
| Special effects | Blue |
| Props | Purple (violet) |
| Vehicles and animals | Pink |
| Sound effects and music | Brown |
| Wardrobe | Circle |
| Makeup and hair | Asterisk |
| Special equipment | Box |
| Production notes | Underline |
Categories that came later, such as visual effects, set dressing, greenery, security, and animal handlers, have no settled color. Scheduling software ships its own defaults for them, and offices change those. If you invent colors, write the key on the first page of the script.
A marked-up passage
Here's a scene tagged with the scheme, with the marks written in brackets:
77 EXT. QUARRY ROAD - DAY
JAKE [red] sprints for the truck [pink]. A DEPUTY [red]
fires twice [blue: squib hits] [purple: revolver]. Jake
dives [orange] behind the tailgate, tearing his
jacket (circle). A hawk [pink] lifts off the rocks.
Two QUARRY WORKERS [green] duck behind a loader [box].
Blood on Jake's palm [asterisk].
Moved to the breakdown sheet, that becomes:
| Box | Entries |
|---|---|
| Cast | 2. Jake, 11. Deputy |
| Stunts | Jake dive behind tailgate (stunt double) |
| Background | 2 quarry workers |
| SFX | 2 squib hits on truck |
| Props | Deputy's revolver (blank-firing) |
| Vehicles / animals | Jake's pickup; trained hawk |
| Wardrobe | Jake: torn jacket, multiples |
| Makeup | Jake: blood on palm |
| Special equipment | front loader (practical) |
The dive and the gunfire both need a stunt coordinator and the SFX team, and the hawk needs a handler. The colors are what make those needs visible when someone flips through 110 pages.
Mistakes with colors
Two colors that look alike under office light (pink and red, purple and blue pencil) cause mis-sorted elements, so test your pencils or highlighters first. Another trap is marking a word once and assuming it carries: the revolver in scene 77 must be marked again in every scene it appears. And people confuse these codes with stripboard colors, where yellow means an exterior day scene, not a silent bit. The stripboard color legend lays out the difference.
In software, the colors are just a display setting. Storiara's script analysis lets you highlight text and choose what to add it as (Prop, Wardrobe, Stunt, and so on), and the highlight color on screen follows that type.