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 "New Project" from your Studio Page:
Once you've selected from the three available episodic formats (Film & TV, Stage Play, or MCAV), simply increase your "Episode Count" to more than one.
Adapting to an Episodic Project
If you've already created a single-script project, you can adapt it from your Project Management Page. Just click the dropdown menu, and select "Add New 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 catalog, budget, and shooting schedule. Note that each Episode has its own 'episode-specific' version of these files, which acts as a per-episode filtered view of that document type.
Master Catalog
If your production has recurring assets, casts, and crew, your Master Catalog inventories each person, 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.
Production-wide & Episode-specific Catalogs
Assets appearing in multiple episodes can be viewed in either production-wide (master) or episode-specific views. Below, the "Summary" section of this asset accounts for scenes and shoots days across multiple episodes. Note that assets can only be "added" to the master catalog, but will appear in episodic catalogs once they are tagged in the that episode's breakdown.
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.
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.
Call Sheets and other production reports will also contain episodic information, as with this One Line Schedule, here:
Managing Episodic Projects
From the Project View, 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 episode list menu, and click "Add New Episode". Note that Projects are typically capped at 13 episodes. To have your cap increased, contact sales@celtx.com.
Renaming Episodes
To rename an episode, click on the episode menu, here:
Reordering Episodes
To reorder your episodes click the episode menu, and select "Reorder": 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:
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, Index Cards, 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.