What are sides, and who needs them?

Sides are the pages of script an actor actually holds on set – that day’s scenes, in shooting order, formatted for reading rather than for the full screenplay. Nobody hands a hundred-page script to an actor for a single day’s work. Sides are the answer: a shooting day’s scenes, or one character’s scenes across the whole script, pulled out and reformatted on their own.

Actors are the obvious audience, but they’re not the only one. A script supervisor tracking continuity works from sides. A dialogue coach preparing an actor for a scene works from sides. Anyone who needs to read exactly what’s being shot that day, without wading through everything around it, is a sides user.

Sides come in two shapes: day sides, every scene scheduled for a given shoot day, and character sides, every scene one character appears in across the production. Both can include a scene or two of surrounding context – the ending of the previous scene, the start of the next – so a reader isn’t dropped into the middle of a story with no bearings.

Because sides are generated straight from the current schedule and the latest script, they don’t need creating, syncing, or refreshing by hand the way a call sheet draft does – they simply reflect whatever is true right now. A schedule change or a late scene edit shows up the next time someone opens the reader.

Sides are also where leak protection tends to live. Exporting sides for a cast member can watermark each copy with that actor’s name, so a page that turns up somewhere it shouldn’t points back to exactly one person.

Related: What is a call sheet?, What is a shooting schedule?