Automating the Screenplay Breakdown
Any screenplay for a film is exactly what the word implies: a description of what the audience’s eyes see on a screen. Nothing else! The screenplay (ideally) should not include any thoughts of characters, or their backstories, simply because the audience CANNOT see that. (Novels are not like this. In novels, you can write the thoughts of characters because words on paper are the only medium you are trying to tell your stories with, but screenplays are different).
Because of this, a scene in a film screenplay usually involves very detailed descriptions of what scenes should look like to the audience. Remember, it is a visual medium. The entire emphasis of a film screenplay is — and should be — on the story’s visual elements.
Once the screenplays are written, the scenes are usually broken down by the pre-production team into immense amounts of data, with buckets of information mentioned about the elements within each scene. The data is then filled into a breakdown sheet like this.
You can think of this page as a product requirements document for “one” scene (in this case, scene 2 of one of my short films). The page mentions whether the scene happens in the interior or the exterior, the scene’s location (e.g., Bill’s house), and the time of day that the scene happens (day or night). They also comprise the characters’ names and what they are doing, wearing, holding in their hands or what can be seen around them (props), when the dialogue begins, what actions happen between dialogues, etc.
Just like this, the breakdown pages need to be created for every single scene, and then each box on this breakdown page becomes a production department on the film. For example, the information in the wardrobe box for all scenes would go to the costume designer, and the makeup information would go to the makeup department. Based on the consolidated information about their respective responsibilities, each department will then source the resources and make them available while filming the scenes.
This is an excruciating exercise, to say the least. Instead of data, the screenplay is in a textual form like a PDF, or worse, a typed one that needs to be scanned. Therefore, to extract the information, there must be a human present to interpret and break down the scene. The pre-production team has to comb through every scene and “hand-fill” the breakdown pages with the information found in those scenes. A regular-length feature film would have around 200-300 scenes. That means 200-300 breakdown pages like these would need to be filled with information. It is several months of manual labour.
When I made my feature film, my screenplay had 190 scenes. I did not have the luxury of hiring a team of people to break down my screenplay, and I did not have several months for pre-production either. I had to develop a radically different solution to break down the scenes.
I am an engineer by trade. I always think of solutions for maximum output with minimum effort. The radical solution my small team and I came up with was to automatically recognize the text input of the screenplay and, based on its format, populate columns of an excel spreadsheet (the scene breakdown spreadsheet), using one row for each scene.
On my team, I was the one imagining the screenplay, and I had an assistant director who would take my creation and find resources to execute it. He was the recipient of the broken-down information. I had to connect my organic imagination with objective data that he could use for resource allocation.
First, I worked with my assistant director to decide what data we wanted from each scene. We basically came up with the column headings for the scene breakdown spreadsheet.
Scene Number
Scene Heading
INT/EXT
Day / Night
Script Page
Page Count
Film Location
Sub-Location
Cast
ADITYA (we had a baby character, so I wanted to separate all scenes that had the baby so that I could quickly filter those scenes)
# of Characters
Props
Vehicles
BEFORE DARK / AFTER DARK
The third member of our team, the software development engineer (SDE), was going to write a software program to accept the screenplay text as an input to populate the spreadsheet with the column headings above. I worked with him to decide the screenplay writing format that his software program could identify.
For example, all character names would be in capital letters in the scene. So whenever the program sees a word with capital letters, it will identify that as a character name. The description of the scene will always start with INT or EXT, then the master location (such as BILL HOUSE), followed by sub-location (LIVING ROOM), followed by a dash and then the time of the day, whether the scene happens BEFORE DARK or AFTER DARK.
This information about the scene would always be before the actual description of the scene, so that whenever the program was going through the text, the moment it saw INT or EXT, it would identify that as a scene and start a separate row in the spreadsheet. This and several other formatting decisions were made.
The SDE wrote the program, and I wrote the screenplay in the format we had agreed upon. Once both were ready, it was time to test our experiment. I exported the screenplay and fed it into the program.
It was mind-blowing! The process that required months of manual labour, with teams of people working on it, was completed in less than 30 minutes on one single laptop for a 190-page screenplay with about 200 scenes. I was super proud. We had automated the screenplay breakdown.
This is how the breakdown spreadsheet looked.
I take immense joy in diffusing the boundary between engineering and creativity, leading technical and creative teams to create products that everyone is extremely proud of! This was a prime example of that. The data was like gold for my assistant director, and even if the screenplay changed, it only took a matter of minutes to regenerate the data.
In the end, the final film received several international accolades. However, all of them were in the art category (acting, directing, cinematography). I wish there were awards for the engineering category, which I am sure we would have won, and still, this is just one of the examples of how we engineered the filmmaking process.
Here is the trailer for the film we made. If you want to watch the entire film, drop me a message.
