Sort & Add Days is one of Think Crew’s biggest time savers. In a single step, it can sort the strips on a board into a sensible shooting order, break them up into shooting days, and clear out old banners and day breaks. It’s the quickest way to turn a freshly imported script into a first-pass schedule.
Opening Sort & Add Days
To open the Sort & Add Days panel, click the “Breakdowns” menu in the schedule menu bar and select “Sort & Add Days…”.
The panel has four sections: Select Board, Sort, Add Day Breaks and Clean Up. Turn on the checkbox next to each of the Sort, Add Day Breaks and Clean Up sections you want to use, set your options, then click the “Sort & Add Days” button at the bottom. You can use any combination of the three. For example, you can add day breaks without re-sorting your board.
Your settings are remembered, so you can make the same changes again later without setting everything up from scratch.
Select Board
First, choose the board you want to work on. The list shows the boards in your current scenario, so make sure you’re in the right scenario before you begin. See Managing Schedule Scenarios.
The board needs at least one strip. If it’s empty, a message will let you know.
Sort
The Sort section has two lists side by side:
- Categories (left): Categories you can sort by, but which aren’t being used
- Sort Order (right): The categories your strips will be sorted by
Drag categories between the two lists to choose what to sort by, and drag them up or down within the Sort Order list to set their priority. Strips are sorted by the first category, then any ties are sorted by the second category, and so on.
The default sort order is Set, INT/EXT, Day/Night and Scene Number. This groups all of the scenes on each set together, with interiors and exteriors and day and night scenes kept together within each set. This is a common starting point for a shooting schedule.
You can also sort by other breakdown fields, such as Script Day, Unit, Location, Sequence, Pages, Script Page and Duration.
Click the arrow button on a category in the Sort Order list to switch between ascending (A to Z, 1 to 9) and descending (Z to A, 9 to 1) order.
A few things to know about sorting:
- Elements are sorted by name. For example, sets are sorted alphabetically by set name.
- Scene numbers are sorted as numbers. Scene 2 comes before scene 10, and scenes with a letter in front, such as A12, are sorted after the plain number.
- Empty fields go last. In ascending order, strips without a value in a sort category are placed after the strips that have one. In descending order, they come first.
- Existing banners and day breaks move to the end. Banners and day breaks don’t have values to sort by, so they’re moved to the bottom of the board. To avoid this, use Clean Up to remove them as part of the sort.
Add Day Breaks
Turn on Add Day Breaks to have Think Crew divide your strips into shooting days. Use the “Add breaks every” field and dropdown to choose how:
- Pages per Day: Start a new day before a strip that would take the day over this many pages. For example, enter 5 to aim for no more than 5 pages a day.
- Hours per Day: Start a new day before a strip that would take the day over this many hours, using each strip’s duration. Strips without a duration don’t count toward the day. See Duration View for setting durations.
- Total Days on Board: Divide the board into this many shooting days, with the pages shared out as evenly as possible
Day breaks are only added between strips, never in the middle of a strip. If a single scene is longer than your daily limit, it gets a day of its own.
Think Crew always makes sure the board ends with a day break, so the last day is counted. New day breaks get a 7:00 AM call time and a 12-hour day. See Adding Day Breaks for how to edit them.
Tip: Existing day breaks aren’t taken into account when new ones are added. If your board already has day breaks, turn on Clean Up and “Remove any existing day breaks” so you don’t end up with extra days.
Clean Up
Turn on Clean Up to remove items from the board before sorting and adding days:
- Remove any existing banners from current board: Deletes every banner on the board. See Creating Banners.
- Remove any existing day breaks from current board: Deletes every day break on the board
Clean Up deletes these items rather than moving them to the recycle bin. Only the selected board is affected.
Best Practices
- Check your scenario and board: Make sure you’re in the right scenario and have the right board selected before you click Sort & Add Days
- Try it in a copy first: Duplicate your scenario and run Sort & Add Days in the copy, so you can compare the results with your original plan. See Managing Schedule Scenarios.
- Start fresh when re-sorting: When you sort a board that already has days, turn on Clean Up for day breaks and use Add Day Breaks to create new ones, so your days match the new order
- Fill in your breakdowns first: Sorting and adding days use your breakdown data, such as sets, pages and durations. The more complete your breakdowns are, the better the results. See Adding Data to a Breakdown.
- Fine-tune by hand: Sort & Add Days gives you a great starting point. From there, drag strips and day breaks into place to finish your schedule. See Drag and Drop Scheduling.
Sort & Add Days gives you flexible control over your production timeline, so you can get from a list of scenes to a workable shooting schedule in seconds.
Here’s a tutorial video on sorting and adding days:
