A beat sheet generator that knows how long your film is

What a beat is here

On this site a beat is a single continuous shot of four to fifteen seconds in one location with at most three people. It has a line, which is two or three sentences of visible action and camera with one spoken line where it helps; a shot size from wide, medium, close-up, two-shot, over-shoulder or insert; a location; and a duration. That definition is deliberate: it is exactly what the renderer can shoot as one scene, so a beat sheet that reads well is also a beat sheet that will cut together.

How the draft is built

Each of the twelve genres carries a three-act skeleton. Heist sets the prize and the crew, runs the plan until a detail goes wrong, then reveals that the real plan was never the one you watched. Ghost story arrives in the place, lets the presence make itself known, and ends with a bargain or a refusal. The drafter follows the skeleton for your genre, fills it from your logline, and sizes the list to your runtime target: eight beats of about seven seconds for sixty seconds, ten of about eleven for two minutes, twelve of up to fifteen for three.

If you name characters from your library before drafting, the drafter uses those names and the beats are pre-cast. If you name sets, the beats that take place in them are linked to the set plates. A director’s note of up to three hundred characters steers tone, period, or the thing you most want to see.

Editing the sheet

The sheet is a list of cards you can rewrite, reorder, recast and retime. Change a shot size with one click; the shot-size clause is added to the prompt when the beat is shot, so a close-up really is framed close. Drag a beat up the order and the beat numbers follow. The running total at the top counts the seconds of every beat plus the six seconds of cards and shows you the cut length live.

You can also skip the drafter entirely and write a sheet by hand. Add a flick, add beats, type lines. The drafter is a two-credit convenience, not a requirement.

From sheet to scenes

A beat sheet is finished when you are willing to shoot it. Each beat shoots separately, at a price shown on its card, so you can shoot the three beats you are surest of, watch the takes, and adjust the rest of the sheet before spending more. When the beats you want are shot, the cut assembles them in order.