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Bytes Sent Anywhere
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Mac · iPad · iPhone
⅛
Scene Length in Industry-Standard Eighths
2
Export Formats
14
Days Free Trial
25+
Years on Film Sets
Overview
A screenplay is not a document. It is a work surface.
Every department reads the same script and takes something different out of it.
SmartBreakdown reads it once — scenes, headings, length in eighths, day or night,
interior or exterior, speaking roles — and then gets out of the way so you can mark
up what your department needs. What normally lives in a printed script, a
private spreadsheet and a folder of reference photos sits in one place instead, and
nothing leaves your device to get there. Built for departments, not production management.
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Production
not a pile of files
Episodes belong to a named production. Departments are shared across all of them, so Video Playback means the same thing in episode one and episode six.
On device
no cloud, no account
Unreleased screenplays are under NDA. The Mac version does not even hold a network entitlement — it could not transmit anything if it tried.
Simple
on purpose
Built because the established tools were too heavy and too cloud-bound for the people who actually do the marking up.
Demo
nothing to supply
A whole production is built in: screenplay, a revision on top of it, departments, notes, costings, a schedule. You can see how the thing works before you hand it anything of your own.
What that is worth in practice
Preparation that survives the next draft
Corrected scene headings are frozen, and a new revision shows you what changed. You re-read the pages that moved instead of going through the whole script again with a highlighter.
One question answered every day
The markup turns into a per-day, per-department work list. “Seven computer playbacks tomorrow” is something you read off — not something you reconstruct at eleven at night.
Nothing to clear with anyone
No account, no shared drive, no cloud terms for the production office to approve. The screenplay stays on your machine, which is the answer everybody wants to hear.
Reading the Screenplay
It reads real screenplays, not tidy ones.
Production drafts are messy: four different heading conventions, watermarks across
every page, scans instead of text, and a PDF that a colleague's software mangled on
the way. SmartBreakdown was measured against real ones from the start — which is why
the import takes seconds and you spend the evening marking up, not retyping scene
headers into a spreadsheet.
Four heading conventions
German and international formats, numbered and unnumbered, with the scene number on the left, on both sides, or not at all. Whatever the production office sends this week, the scene list comes out right on the first attempt.
Scans go through OCR
If a PDF carries no text layer, Apple's on-device Vision framework reads it. No upload, no service. A photocopied draft becomes a working breakdown instead of a dead end.
Damaged files recovered
A broken PDF often still holds an earlier, intact version inside it. That one gets read instead of showing you an error — so you are not chasing the office for a clean copy an hour before the meeting.
Headings you can correct
Where the parser is unsure it says so, and you put it right. The scene identity is then frozen, so a new draft never scatters the work you have already done.
Length in eighths
Page count per scene the way the schedule counts it, plus time of day, interior/exterior and the speaking roles. Everything the AD will ask you for is already there before you have marked a single thing.
Set the way it was written
Dialogue is set as dialogue and action as action, in the indents a screenplay uses. It reads on screen the way it reads on paper — which is what makes it bearable to sit in for a whole evening.
Coloured stripes for each draft
Blue pages, pink pages — the way the paper does it. A stripe down the margin shows what that draft changed, so a revision is something you can see at a glance rather than something you diff by hand.
See what was there before
One switch puts the previous wording back on screen. When a line changed under you, you can check what it used to say instead of trusting your memory of last Tuesday.
Mark them read as you go
Work through the changed passages and tick them off. What is left is exactly what you have not looked at yet — which is the only honest answer to “have you seen the new draft?”
Breakdown
Mark it up the way your department thinks.
Departments are yours to name, colour and give a symbol — Video Playback, Special Props,
Set Decoration, whatever the production calls them. Notes and reference images hang off
the scene, and text you highlight in the script keeps the department's colour. You are
not filling in someone else's form: the breakdown ends up shaped the way your department
already thinks about the job.
Marker bar instead of menus
Select text, tap the department. On iPad that is one gesture; on the Mac ⌘1 to ⌘9 do the same thing. A scene takes seconds, not a trip through three menus and a dialog.
The armed pen
Pick up a department once and every further selection is marked in that colour — until you put it down. It halves the clicks on a script you are working through properly, and a long night gets noticeably shorter.
Notes and reference images
Screen designs, set photos, storyboards, continuity — stills and short videos, per scene and per department, with captions that carry into the export. The picture sits next to the line that caused it, not in a folder somebody has to go looking for.
Suggestions, never automatic
The wording proposes departments; Apple Intelligence sharpens the proposal where it is available. Tapping accepts. Nothing is ever set on its own — the breakdown stays yours, and stays something you can defend in a meeting.
Semantic search — entirely on device
Search by meaning, not only by exact words. Ask for “every scene involving a screen” and find the laptop, phone and video-wall scenes even when the word screen never appears. The screenplay is indexed locally and nothing is uploaded.
Similar scenes
Marked one scene? The app points at the ones that resemble it, so a whole motif gets handled in one pass — instead of being rediscovered on the shooting day, when it costs money.
Your production's own colours
Not a fixed palette you have to learn. If this production has always had Video Playback in blue and Special Props in violet, it keeps them, and everyone reads the sheet without a legend.
Notes you can read at a glance
Bold, italic, larger — wherever it helps somebody find the important line in a hurry. A note that gets read on a set is a note that was formatted for a set.
Scene level and text level
A department can hang on the whole scene, or on the exact sentence that caused it. Most scenes need both — the overview for the list, the sentence for the argument about it.
What It Costs
The number grows where the work is written down.
Put an estimate on any note — two phones, a rain bar, three doubles — and the app
does the adding. Per scene, per department, across whatever set of scenes you have
picked, and straight into the PDF and Excel exports. No second spreadsheet that
somebody has to keep in step with the breakdown, because there is no second document.
An amount on any note
You are already writing down what has to be built. Putting a figure next to it costs one more field and turns the breakdown into a costing at the same time. The currency belongs to the production, not to whoever's laptop happens to be open.
It adds up three ways
Per scene, per department, and across any selection you make — all scenes, one shooting day, the six scenes you are arguing about. The total follows the selection.
It says what is still missing
“1 item has no amount yet — it is not in this total.” A number you can trust is one that admits what it does not yet contain.
Into the exports
The totals travel into the PDF and the Excel sheet with everything else. Filter by department in Excel and the figure at the bottom is still right.
No second spreadsheet
The costing lives on the notes, so it cannot drift out of step with the breakdown. Change the note, and the figure that quotes it changes with it.
An estimate, not a budget
The app says so on the sheet itself. It is what your department expects the work to cost — the right number to walk into the meeting with, and it does not pretend to be more.
Script & Continuity
How long is it, and which night are we in?
Two questions that used to need a stopwatch and a wall chart. Every scene carries a
running time and a story day, both of them yours to correct, and both of them adding
up per shooting day and per episode. An episode has a length from the first day of
prep instead of from the first assembly.
A running time from day one
Estimated from the length of each scene, so the episode has a duration before anybody has shot a frame. When the draft comes in twelve pages long, you can say what that means in minutes in the same meeting.
Corrected wherever you have timed it
Sat with a stopwatch through the dialogue scene? Put the real figure in and it replaces the estimate for that scene alone. The total gets more accurate the further into the job you are.
Story days you can follow
Day 2, night 3, the flashback — named the way the production names them, and shown on every scene. Continuity stops being a private list in somebody's folder.
One tap for the whole story day
Tap a story day and every scene belonging to it comes up together — shot weeks apart, in three locations, in the order the story has them. That is the view that catches the wrong shirt.
The clock the story is on
Not the shooting clock — the one inside the scene. Scene 3 sits at 23:40, scene 9 at 01:15: the same night, an hour and a half further on. It is what tells you what the light has to do and how worn everybody in shot should look.
Both of them add up on their own
Running times and story days total per shooting day and per episode. The head of the scene list carries the answer — 25 scenes, 8 1/8 pages, about 8:44 — and it moves as you correct it.
Shooting Schedule
What do we actually need tomorrow?
Enter the shooting days, or read in a one-line schedule. The breakdown then turns into
a work list per department and per day — “7 computer playbacks needed today” — and
prints as a day sheet you can hand out. The same marking-up you did once now answers
the call sheet, the prep list and the “what do you need from us” email, without you
sorting anything by hand.
Movie Magic schedules, cleanly matched
Import one-line schedules and detailed production reports. SmartBreakdown matches
shooting days and scene numbers, while the screenplay remains the source of truth
for headings, cast and page counts.
Review the match before applying it
If a production uses a different scene-number format, the app detects the pattern,
shows the match rate and names anything it could not place. You stay in control.
A new revision does not duplicate
Schedules get reissued constantly. Read the new one in and you see what changes:
new days, changed days, and the ones no longer listed — which are never selected
for you, because usually they were only pushed.
Tap a day, get that day
One tap narrows the whole episode down to the scenes being shot that day, in
shooting order rather than script order — which is the order you will actually
work in. The day carries its own page count, its running time and the story days
it touches, so a day that reads short on paper cannot quietly be a long one.
Cross-episode daysPer-department day listShooting orderPages per dayRunning time per dayStory days per dayDay sheet as PDFMovie Magic one-linerDetailed production reportGerman & international
Export & Handover
Out of the app and onto the table.
A breakdown is only worth something once other people can read it. Lists print on A4 or
Letter — whichever your region uses — and go to Excel when someone wants to add the page
counts up themselves. Nobody needs the app, an account or a licence to work with what
comes out of it.
PDF for printing
Full breakdown with the script text, or a compact work list with one row per scene. Reference images included, so the sheet you hand over answers questions instead of raising them.
Excel for calculating
One column per department gives the classic grid: filter by department, add up the eighths, read off the estimate. The budget conversation starts from your numbers rather than from somebody's re-count.
Pass an episode on
Filter the export down to what the recipient actually needs — one department, one shooting day, one episode. Nobody has to read past forty pages to find their three notes.
One production, one file
The whole production saves as a single document you can archive, move to another machine, or open with a double click. It carries its own currency and the draft it stands on, so a colleague who opens it sees your figures in your currency and knows at a glance which revision they are looking at. No library to rebuild, nothing to re-link, nothing to lose.
By AirDrop, or any way you like
Pass an episode — or one department's work on its own — to a colleague as a single file. AirDrop across the production office, a memory stick, an email if it has to be. A package that arrives by AirDrop is recognised as one and opens straight into “Take over work”, instead of leaving something unreadable in your downloads.
Merging that cannot go wrong
A package names the episode it came out of, so you can see at a glance whether it belongs where you are about to put it — even after a fortnight in somebody's downloads. It merges item by item: the newer state wins, deletions travel with it, and reading the same file in twice changes nothing at all. No evening spent working out who overwrote whom.
Privacy
The screenplay never leaves the device.
This is not a marketing line, it is the reason the app exists. Colleagues chose against
the established tools because an unreleased screenplay ended up in somebody else's cloud.
None
Data collected
No account, no sign-in, no analytics, no tracking, no third-party SDKs.
None
Network connections
The signed Mac app holds three entitlements: sandbox, the files you pick, and printing. No network at all.
On device
All the clever bits
OCR, semantic search and the department suggestions all run locally through Apple's frameworks. No cloud AI is contacted.
Yours
Always readable
Your work stays open, readable and exportable — including after a subscription ends. Nothing is ever held hostage.
Choose a monthly subscription, a yearly subscription or a one-time purchase. Every
option covers all three — no per-device licence and no seat to activate.
Prepare the breakdown on a Mac, mark up with a finger or Apple Pencil on iPad, then
check today’s scenes and work list from your iPhone on set. The same production file
opens on every device without a conversion step and returns to the scene you left.
macOS
Menus, keyboard shortcuts, real save panels, printing. Where a breakdown gets prepared — a long evening with a big screen and both hands on the keyboard.
iPadOS
Marking up with a finger or a pencil, on the floor, between setups. Keyboard shortcuts work here too — and it opens again on the scene you were last in, so a two-minute gap between setups is a usable two minutes.
iOS
Looking things up when there is no room for anything bigger. Today's scenes, today's list — the answer in your pocket while somebody is waiting for it.
The same production, on the iPad
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Use Cases
Built for departments, not production management.
For Props, Sound, Script Supervision, Video Playback, SFX, VFX, Costume and every
department that has to turn the script into practical work. Each feature began with
a real question on a set.
Video Playback
Every screen in the picture, per scene and per shooting day, with reference images and version notes attached where they belong — so the playback that has to be built is on a list, not in somebody's head.
Sound
Playback cues, practical sound sources and difficult locations marked where they occur, with a day-by-day list ready on the iPhone when somebody asks.
Props
A list per day instead of per script — and the same list as an Excel sheet when someone wants to price it. One breakdown covers both the shopping and the budget.
Script Supervision
Story days, in-scene clock times, measured running times and revision changes stay beside the scene — on iPad at the desk or iPhone on the floor.
VFX & SFX
Mark whole passages, not single lines, and keep the note next to the sentence that caused it — the context survives all the way into the export.
Costume
Group scenes by story day, keep reference images with the exact scene and carry the right continuity information onto the set.
Series work
Six episodes, shared departments, a shooting day that mixes them — the case the established tools handle worst, and the one this app was built around.
Contact
Start with everything unlocked.
Try every feature free for 14 days, with no account and nothing uploaded. Continue
with a monthly subscription, a yearly subscription or a one-time purchase — every
option covers Mac, iPad and iPhone. If a subscription ends, your existing work remains
open, readable and exportable. SmartBreakdown is made by someone who spends his working
life on film sets.
