FilmBase 1.4: regions, because the world doesn't print on Letter

Film crews work everywhere, and almost everywhere is not the United States. A production office in Cape Town prints on A4, calls crew for 06:00, and checks the forecast in Celsius. Software that assumes Letter, 6:00 AM, and Fahrenheit isn’t wrong exactly. It’s just constantly, slightly in your way.

Version 1.4 fixed that with regions.

Pick a region, everything follows

In Settings you pick your region, and FilmBase sets the paper size, the time format (12-hour or 24-hour), and the temperature unit to match. Every new project inherits those defaults. Shooting a co-production across two countries with different standards? Each project can override the workspace settings and keep its own.

The part that took restraint: every PDF respects your paper size now, except one.

Scripts stay on Letter, and that’s deliberate

Screenplay page counts are sacred. “A page a minute” only works because every script in the industry paginates the same way, on US Letter, and your schedule and budget in FilmBase both lean on those page counts. If switching your region to South Africa silently re-paginated your script onto A4, your eighths would shift and your day breakdowns would quietly stop matching everyone else’s copy of the script.

So scripts default to Letter no matter your region, and Letter prints fine on A4 paper. If you genuinely need an A4 script export, it’s there, and the page breaks stay where they were. Call sheets, budgets, and breakdowns follow your region; the script follows the industry.

Call sheets got smarter while we were in there

The 1.4 call sheet work started with weather, because typing a forecast into a call sheet by hand is a 1990s activity. Set a location on a shoot day and the weather fills itself in. Change your temperature unit in settings and every call sheet updates.

The rest of the sheet caught up too:

• Custom fields, redesigned. Compact colour-coded cards, with new types: Date, Person, URL, Email, and Contact, which autosuggests from your crew list. URL and email fields export as clickable links in the PDF.
• Times that format themselves. Type “0630” and get 06:30. The colons are not your job.
• Autofill carries everything. Copy yesterday’s sheet and your custom fields come along, values included, with the label and colour choices you made on Crew Call, Meals, and Wrap.
• Additional Times are yours to define. Unit Call, Catering, Makeup, Drone Unit, whatever your day needs, each as its own labelled, coloured slot.
• Location contacts on the sheet. Base camp, technical base, and crew parking contacts live on the call sheet itself, and empty sections hide in the PDF instead of printing blank boxes.

Call sheets that stay attached

The least glamorous improvement in 1.4 might be the most important: call sheets are now firmly attached to their shoot days through every kind of edit. Save a day, reorder days, renumber the whole schedule chronologically — the call sheets and end-of-day markers travel with their days, every time. Anyone who has rebuilt a call sheet from memory in another tool knows exactly why this is in the headline features and not the fine print.

Also in this release: sides export in script order or shooting order, scene allocator day cards with editable call and wrap times, and page totals shown in eighths, the way schedules actually talk about pages.

Thanks for using FilmBase. Working somewhere our region presets get wrong? We want to hear about it: [email protected]