How to Color Code Script Elements

Video Transcript

"Hi. Chris Cobb for Expert Village. Welcome back. We're going to break down the script now using our colored highlighters. First thing you do always is you establish a legend, if you will, meaning you take these markers and you figure out what they're going to stand for based on the boxes in your breakdown page. Now you don't have to highlight everything on these boxes. Some people do. I've done this so many times I don't anymore because I know if I have a good Prop Master, a good Stunt Person, a good Special Effects or Make-Up Artist; you don't actually need to tell them everything that's going to be in a scene. They're going to figure it out for themselves. So we tend to highlight those things that the script calls out and that you know need to be top of mind for everybody. Just for them to keep in mind. For instance, this is the day we're going to have the big explosion, or this is the day when we have that special effects hair. So everybody be prepared for that. But the first thing you do is you take your pens and you create a legend with them. And what you try to do and this is going to sound, again, just the voice of experience speaking, is try not to have one color that's similar. Say this one and this one together as say, cast and background extras, because if you're looking at your breakdown in a dark set somewhere or in the dark of night on a windy, cold, sweat plain, as you're trying to figure out the next shot, these two colors can look exactly the same in the dark. So just make contrast be your friend here. So I tend not to use yellow to highlight cast. A lot of people do. I don't. I tend to use orange because it's bold, strikes you, you know what's going on. So then I take the opposite color of orange and that's either blue or green, and the blue is what I'd use for background. Then I will use pink for props, key props. And I will use the green for say key hair or make-up. And then finally I use the yellow one for just particular notes throughout the script. I will also say underline something that's hair, make-up or wardrobe, I'll underline it with the green, etc, etc. There are all sorts of little tricks you can do. But the first thing I always do is I mark on the script. So come over and look at what I'm doing. So what I do is I draw a line and then I write in that line "cast". I usually write in pencil, you can write in pen. It doesn't matter. And then I take my next color, blue and I write "extras". Now you can see on the page how they're contrasting like I like them to, just so that I don't in the dark of a set or in the middle of the night on a location, confuse them. And then of course I take, I'm using pink, remember, for my next categories. And that's going to be "props" and "vehicles". Alright, and then I grab a green. And I tend to use green for all three departments of hair, make-up and wardrobe. I just do it a little bit differently. So for the green stripe, I do hair, HR and MU. You can have your own abbreviations of course. And then I usually just draw a line and I do wardrobe. So now that I know what my breakdown's going to be, let's start breaking it down."