What Are Script Sides? A Production Guide (2026)

Nobody on a film set reads the whole script. The 1st AD works from a stripboard, the gaffer works from a lighting plan, and the actor stepping out of a trailer at 6:40 a.m. works from a thin stapled packet called script sides — only the scenes being shot that day.

The word confuses people because it means two things depending on who says it: a casting excerpt for an audition, or the day's shooting pages for cast and crew. Both descend from the same 16th-century workaround, and exactly one physical example of the original survives.

This guide covers what sides are, where the term came from, how a packet gets built, how productions keep sides from leaking, and the failure nobody prints a convention for — a packet that was right at the printer and wrong by the time it reached set.

What are script sides?

Script sides are the pages of a screenplay covering only the scenes scheduled for a single shooting day, arranged in shooting order and distributed to the cast and crew who need them. They are not a summary, a rewrite, or an abridgement — the text is identical to the screenplay. What changes is scope.

A feature screenplay traditionally runs 90 to 120 pages, on the craft rule of roughly one page per minute of screen time, and gives everyone everything. A call sheet is one page of logistics. Sides sit between them — today's dialogue and action, and nothing else.

Why they're called sides

The name survives from Elizabethan theater, where no actor received the full play. Each performer got a "part" — a narrow strip of paper carrying only their own lines, each preceded by a few cue words. The reason was economic before it was strategic: paper was expensive and every copy was written out by hand.

The American Shakespeare Center notes that cue scripts became the primary tool for learning a role, and that they privatized rehearsal — an actor could prepare independently of the company, because there was nothing else to prepare from. Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern argue in Shakespeare in Parts that this shaped the writing itself: an actor working from a cue script genuinely didn't know what was coming, so hesitation and surprise were structural rather than performed.

One of these documents still exists. The Henslowe-Alleyn archive at Dulwich College holds the only surviving actor's part from the period — Edward Alleyn's role in Orlando Furioso, copied by a playhouse scribe and annotated by Alleyn himself. The catalogue dates its use to February 1591/92, and it survives incomplete.

Actors stored these strips rolled around a wooden dowel — a small scroll. That object is where the English word "role" comes from, by way of the French rôle and Latin rotulus, both meaning a roll of paper. The jump from "part" to "side" is less cleanly documented, and worth stating carefully: what's verifiable is that modern usage inherits the same logic of partial distribution, not that anyone can date the change.

Audition sides vs. shooting sides

Both meanings are correct, and the difference is department. Audition sides are the excerpt a casting director selects so an actor can read for a role — often one scene, sometimes a fragment. Shooting sides are the day's pages, distributed on set. Same principle of "you get only what you need," different stage of production.

In North America, casting sides move through Breakdown Services: casting directors build sides from an uploaded script, attach them to a role, and actors receive them with restrictions available, including limiting a recipient to online viewing, which removes printing and downloading. Everything below this point is about the production side.

How to make script sides

Building a packet is mechanical, and the conventions are consistent enough that sides from one production are legible to a crew member arriving from another. Five steps:

1. Pull the day's scenes from the schedule. Take the scene numbers listed on tomorrow's call sheet — not a range, the actual list, since a shooting day rarely runs consecutively through the script.
2. Order them in shooting order. Sides follow the plan for the day, not the story. A scene shot first appears first, whatever its scene number.
3. Strike what isn't filming. Where a scene being shot shares a page with one that isn't, the unused material is boxed and crossed through with a single diagonal line . It stays visible so the performer keeps context. If a scene has been cut entirely, a replacement page reading OMITTED is issued, because a missing page number reads as an error.
4. Carry the revision state. Sides inherit whatever revision the script is on — colored pages, A-pages, and margin asterisks all travel with the scenes. More on that below.
5. Print small and put the call sheet on top. Half-size pages, stapled top-left, with the call sheet as page one doing double duty as cover and contents.

Page size and revision colors

Neither convention is codified. No guild, union, or standards body publishes a sides format. Half-letter — 5.5 by 8.5 inches — is a de facto practice rather than a written standard, documented by production software vendors, and two-up or booklet printing is common where paper volume matters.

Revision colors work the same way. The sequence in general use runs White, Blue, Pink, Yellow, Green, Goldenrod, Buff, Salmon, Cherry, and often Tan, after which it repeats as Second or Double White, Blue, and so on. Two caveats worth knowing: the Writers Guild does not publish this table publicly, and the two most-cited references disagree on whether Tan belongs in the cycle. UK productions commonly swap the first two revisions, running Pink before Blue.

The point of the colors isn't decoration. A 1st AD glancing at a stack of goldenrod pages knows instantly that someone is holding a version six revisions old. A-pages serve the same discipline: insert material between pages 12 and 13 and it becomes 12A, 12B, so nothing downstream renumbers and the schedule built on those numbers stays valid.

How sides get distributed — and kept secret

Sides go out with the call sheet the evening before, and on productions with an audience waiting for spoilers they are handled as controlled documents. The arithmetic is simple: a screenplay leaks from one place, and sides leak from dozens — day players, background, drivers, anyone who lifts a packet off a chair at lunch.

The industry answer is per-recipient watermarking, now standard across production platforms: the recipient's name or a unique identifier is burned into every page, so a leaked copy points back to a person. Some tools add forensic barcodes, expiring links, or download tracking on top.

How that feels from the receiving end is worth hearing. Barry Sloane, describing House of the Dragon, said it took "like 18 codes to get sides" — and that at the end of the day someone knocked on his trailer to take the pages back and lock them in a box. He added that he was fairly sure only a few leads, Matt Smith among them, saw full scripts at all.

Marvel went further on Avengers: Infinity War. Paul Bettany described receiving a script with deliberately fake scenes written into it after three prior leaks, with the genuine pages confined to three tightly controlled tablets. Director Anthony Russo has separately disputed that any fake scenes were actually filmed.

Secrecy isn't universal, though. Westworld actor Leonardo Nam has said his cast simply received scripts as they were written and read them together — a reminder that lockdown intensity is a production decision, not an industry rule.

And the useful caveat on watermarking. When HBO was breached in 2017, five Game of Thrones scripts leaked — watermarked, by the attackers, with their own slogan. A watermark doesn't stop a leak. It tells you afterward whose copy walked — a lesser promise, still worth having, because attribution changes behavior.

The packet that's already out of date

Sides are generated from the schedule, and schedules move — a location falls through, a cast member goes unavailable, weather pushes an interior day forward. The packet was right at 2 p.m. and wrong by 5 p.m., and nothing printed on it says which. That gap is where the expensive mistakes live: someone rehearsing a scene that got pushed, or a 1st AD reconciling paper against a plan that changed twice.

Filmustage builds sides inside the Scheduling tab, next to the stripboard, so a packet assembles from the day breaks that already exist instead of by re-picking scenes by hand. You choose the shooting day, tick scenes in or out, and set the order to follow shooting order or script order. Multi-day mode bundles several days into one packet, each in its own section, and productions running more than one unit can scope a packet to a single unit.

Two behaviors make a packet survive a real day. Cross-out is non-destructive — strike a line that isn't being filmed and it still prints, greyed and struck through, so the performer keeps the surrounding context; because it saves per day, the same scene can carry a different skip count on a different shooting day. Shot status turns the view into a script supervisor's tracker — mark a scene Not shot, Shot, Partial, Held, or Omitted, attach continuity notes and take references, and a Partial scene carries its continuity into the next day's sides.

Then the export answers the staleness question directly. Generating the PDF lets you stamp a QR code on every page; scanning it on set returns a status page saying whether the packet still matches the current schedule — Up to date or Outdated. If the schedule shifts after export, the app flags the export as outdated so you can regenerate before anyone shoots from dead paper. A Skip scenes already shot option keeps yesterday's completed work out of tomorrow's packet. You can try it on your own schedule without printing anything first.

The status page does a second job worth knowing about: it names who exported the packet and when, so a stale copy on set carries an accountable name and a timestamp instead of being anonymous paper. The printed cover page serves the same purpose in ink, stamping the version number alongside the export date.

Who sees your script sides

Pages leave the production office for people who won't be on the payroll next week, which is why watermarking exists — and why the control belongs in a policy rather than in a per-file decision someone has to remember to make.

Filmustage applies content protection to PDF exports and to the on-screen view inside the app. A forensic watermark tiles across the protected surface and can carry the identity of the person viewing or exporting, alongside a custom notice in your own wording. Exported PDFs can be locked against editing and copying, or require a password to open. Export access itself is a setting: all exports, PDF only, or none.

The layering is the operationally useful part. Protection is set as an organization default, overridden per project, overridden again for a single collaborator, and can be strengthened for one individual export — but never weakened. Only the project or organization owner changes the policy, and anyone adding protection at export time can add to what the owner enforced, not remove it.

For the security questionnaire that eventually arrives from a studio: Filmustage holds a TPN Blue Shield, reflecting a detailed self-assessment reviewed by the Trusted Partner Network, and is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant following an independent audit of its controls over several months. Scripts are stored on US-based cloud infrastructure and are never used to train models.

The Bottom Line

Sides are one of the oldest working conventions in performance, and they survived four centuries because the logic never stopped being true: give a performer the pages for today, not the pages for the project. Paper cost drove it in Shakespeare's playhouses. Attention and leak surface drive it now.

What changed is that the packet is no longer the last step. A schedule that lives in software keeps moving after the pages are printed, and most of what goes wrong on set lives in that gap. Get the conventions right, watermark what leaves the building, and give the crew a way to tell whether the paper in their hands is still true.