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Celtx Pro Episodic Projects

If your project carries over multiple instalments, reuses assets, involves block scheduling, or shares a budget with other productions – Celtx's Episodic Project management will save you time and stress by fully integrating your scripts and production documents across episodes.

 

Table of Contents

Creating Episodic Projects
Adapting to an Episodic Project 
Episodic Project Features
Managing Episodic Projects

Creating Episodic Projects

To start a new Episodic Project, click "Create" from your Studio Page:

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Film & TV, Multi-Column AV (MCAV), and Stageplay all allow for Episodic projects. Under your enterprise plan you have access to create up to 13 episodes per project, though many enterprise teams also use our unlimited episodic add-on. 

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Adapting to an Episodic Project 

If you've already created a single-script project, you can adapt it from your Navigation Menu. Just click the options menu, and select "Add Episode...".

Episodic Project Features

Depending on your Plan, your Episodic Project will now have several new features that will help you write, plan, and shoot your production. These may vary slightly based on the project type, but we'll review the offerings of Film & TV to provide an overview.

Master Files

Master Files are the nerve centre of your new Episodic Project – helping you to plan and shoot across multiple episodes drawing from a single beat sheet, catalog, cast & crew, shooting schedule, and budget. Note that each Episode has its own 'episode-specific' script and storyboard. 

Master Catalog

If your production has recurring assets, your Master Catalog inventories each character, place, or thing into one document. This has several advantages across the entire writing and production process:

 

Consistent Script Breakdown

Assets from all episodes, or those not yet tagged via breakdown, will appear in the "existing items" menu of a given department, ensuring that come shoot day, equipment, props, wardrobe, and people will be in the right place at the right time.

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Episodic Catalogs

Assets appearing in multiple episodes can all be viewed in the production-wide (master) catalog. Below, the "Summary" section of this asset accounts for scenes and shoots days across multiple episodes. Note that assets can be directly "added" to the master catalog, as well.

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Master Schedule & Reports

Episodic production is a very time-conscious endeavour, and "block shooting" – shooting scenes out of sequence to maximize efficiencies – is key to the an on-time, on-budget project. Your enterprise plan also allows you to manage shooting units so that you can schedule two units simultaneously.

To block schedule scenes, drag and drop strips in the stripboard as normal. You can sort and filter from any unscheduled scenes by clicking the "sort" button. Below, the producers decided to shoot all of Kirby's scenes first, and then ordered those by time-of-day and setting.

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Call Sheets and other production reports will also contain episodic information, as with this One Line Schedule, here:

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Managing Episodic Projects

From the Navigation Menu, you can add and remove episodes, name and rename episodes, as well as reorder and duplicate episodes.

Adding Episodes

To add an episode click on the options menu next to the name of your project, and click "Add Episode...". Note that some Enterprise are capped at 13 episodes. To have your cap increased, contact sales@celtx.com. If you already have the "unlimited" episodes package, we've provided the ability to create up to 100 episodes. If you require more and we haven't already discussed this during your onboarding process, we simply ask that you reach out to support@celtx.com to let us know your upper limit.

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Renaming Episodes

To rename an episode, click on the episode menu, here: 

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Reordering Episodes 

To reorder your episodes click on the options menu next to the name of your project, and select "Reorder Episodes": then, drag & drop the episodes in order. Note that the episode will keep its original name, so it's a good practice to give each episode a unique name before reordering: 

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Duplicating Episodes

You can duplicate episodes from the episode menu as well. This is a great way to keep your story within a single script during the writing phase, before 'splitting' it for production.

Trashing/Deleting Episodes

You can delete episodes from the episode menu. Note that while the Script and Storyboard of this episode is recoverable from the Trash, it will not return to your episode list; rather, it will exist as an "additional file" within the Project view; any production-related information, such as breakdown tags, will be removed. Note this will not remove assets from your Master Catalog, even if those assets only appear in the deleted episode.

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