Breakdown27

Script breakdown for producers

131 pages.
127 scenes.
Nine seconds.

Drop in the screenplay PDF. Before you have finished reading this sentence you have every scene, every location, day and night, the cast days, the page eighths and a stripboard you can shoot from.

Break down a script — free See how

No card. No upload. No clock ticking on the free plan.

Stripboard — 127 scenes
1EXT. ST. PATRICK'S DAY PARADE — DAY1/8
2INT. L STREET BAR & GRILLE — EVENING3 3/8
3INT. M.I.T. CLASSROOM — DAY7/8
4EXT. SOUTH BOSTON ROOFTOP — DUSK2/8
5INT. CHUCKIE'S CAR — CONTINUOUS2 7/8
6EXT. TOM FOLEY PARK — AFTERNOON1 5/8
Day Night Magic hour Colours follow the production stripboard convention
127scenes read
131 1/8pages measured
41characters found
73locations grouped

Measured on a real feature screenplay of 131 pages. The page total the tool computed matched the document exactly — because it measures the coordinates on the page instead of estimating from line counts.

You cannot budget what nobody has read yet

And reading it properly — highlighter in hand, scene by scene, every prop and costume and vehicle transcribed into a spreadsheet — takes days. Then the writer sends draft four.

Without this
  • Days of highlighting before the first number exists
  • A new draft means starting a good part of it again
  • The breakdown lives in one person's head and one spreadsheet
  • Nobody can say what the rewrite actually costs
With Breakdown27
  • The structure is on screen before your coffee goes cold
  • A new draft only re-analyses the scenes that changed
  • Every department gets its own sheet, signed off by a person
  • The rewrite arrives with its price tag attached

Three steps

  1. 1

    Drop in the PDF

    Read inside your browser, using the real coordinates on the page — which is why the page eighths come out accurate instead of estimated. Final Draft .fdx files are read exactly, with no guesswork at all.

  2. 2

    Read the structure — free, forever

    Scenes, interiors and exteriors, time of day, locations grouped by base, speaking and silent cast, lines per character, page eighths, character matrix, stripboard and Day Out of Days. No AI. No cost. No trial clock.

  3. 3

    Add the department detail

    AI drafts props, set dressing, costumes per character, hair and makeup, vehicles, animals, weapons, SFX, VFX, stunts, music, camera equipment and production notes, with a complexity rating for every scene. Then a person edits it and signs it off, department by department.

Why this is not just another breakdown tool

Scheduling suites have existed for decades and they are good at what they do. Six things about the category kept getting in our way.

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Nothing to tag

Conventionally, someone tags every element by hand before a single report exists.

Here the PDF is parsed automatically. The whole structural breakdown is there before you touch anything.

🔒

The PDF never leaves

Conventionally, you upload the screenplay file and wait while a server reads it.

Here the file is parsed by code running in your own browser: the PDF itself is never uploaded. What gets saved to your account is the breakdown that comes out of it.

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Draft four is cheap

Conventionally, a new draft means re-tagging, in whole or in part.

Here every scene carries a fingerprint. Unchanged scenes keep the work already done — you pay only for what moved.

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Not only English

Conventionally, tooling is built around English-language conventions.

Here English and Italian sluglines read equally — INT./EST., GIORNO/NOTTE, CONTINUO and all.

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Built to hand off

Conventionally, some formats are proprietary and awkward to leave.

Here: Excel, CSV, PDF, a tab-delimited file for scheduling suites, a calendar file, and one sheet per department.

🎬

Free means free

Conventionally, you get a countdown trial or a quote request.

Here the whole structural breakdown is free, with no expiry and no card. You pay when you want the department detail.

Where the established tools are still ahead: full production accounting, complex multi-unit scheduling, call sheets, payroll. If your production runs on those, this sits alongside them — the export exists to hand off, not to lock you in.

The details that decide a budget

Page eighths that are actually right

Measured from the real coordinates in the PDF. On a 131-page screenplay the total came out at 131 1/8.

Draft comparison in money

Not a text diff: scenes in and out, pages up or down, new locations to find, characters to cast, nights added.

A DOOD you can contract from

Start work, work, work finish — and the hold days between an actor's first and last, which is where money quietly leaks.

Silent characters counted

Present with no lines still costs a cast day. They are found in the action, not just in the dialogue cues.

AI drafts, people sign off

Every department on every scene goes draft → in review → approved, so you know how much a human has really checked.

Spending you can see and stop

Every AI run says what it will cost in credits and asks first. A monthly cap and a kill switch sit behind it.

Everything it does

One screenplay in. Every document a production office asks for, out.

Breakdown

  • Scene list with INT/EXT, set, time of day and page eighths measured from the PDF
  • Cast per scene, speaking and silent, with cast numbers
  • Locations grouped, with the single-scene ones flagged as candidates to merge
  • Fourteen departments per scene: props, set dressing, costumes, hair & makeup, vehicles, animals, weapons, FX, VFX, stunts, music, camera, crowds, production notes
  • Marked script: the breakdown against the text, colour-coded, entry by entry
  • Every department goes draft → in review → approved
  • New draft in: what changed, what it costs, and the sheets you already paid for are reused

Schedule

  • Stripboard you reorder by dragging, with day banners and cast numbers
  • Suggested schedule that groups by location and keeps nights together
  • Day Out of Days with start work, work, work finish and the hold days in between
  • Sides for any shooting day, or for one actor, with the rest of the day in an appendix
  • The shoot as a calendar file for the whole crew's phones

Money

  • Budget built from the breakdown: quantities from your data, rates from you
  • Every line says where its quantity came from, so it can be argued with
  • VFX broken down shot by shot, in complexity bands, with what production must deliver on the day
  • A bid package that makes competing VFX quotes comparable
  • Production note: risks, critical departments, days, where to save, what to ask the director

Notes and people

  • Notes anchored to the exact words in the script, on layers by department
  • Hide every layer but one and print that department its own script
  • Scene-level notes and a breakdown-progress view
  • Projects and drafts kept apart, so a revision never overwrites what you approved

It leaves the building

  • Final Draft (.fdx) — what Movie Magic Scheduling, EP Scheduling and Gorilla actually import
  • Excel and CSV, one row per scene, with Movie Magic field names
  • A sheet per department, to send to each head of department
  • Marked script, sides, budget top sheet and VFX bid package as print-ready PDFs
  • Calendar (.ics) for the shooting schedule

Control

  • The PDF is read in your browser: the file itself is never uploaded
  • Every AI run says what it costs in credits and asks before spending
  • Three analysis levels — Fast, Smart, Deep — so you decide how much a script is worth
  • A monthly cap and a kill switch, both changeable while the work runs
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Your screenplay stays yours

An unreleased screenplay is the most confidential document a production handles, so here is exactly what happens to it — without the usual hand-waving.

Read your script tonight

Drop in the PDF and see the whole shape of it before you commit a euro.

Break down a script — free Compare the plans