Concepts

The core objects Throughline is built from. Everything in the product is one of these, or a relationship between two of them.

Productions

A production is a show. A feature, a season of television, a commercial — one production per thing you're making. An episodic series is still a single production: its episodes live underneath it rather than each getting their own, so the graph, the crew list, and the budget stay whole across the season instead of splitting at episode boundaries.

Departments

A production is organized into departments — Props, Camera, Editorial, VFX, and so on. Each department has its own view: the assets it owns, the people on it, the approvals waiting on it, and the deliveries moving in and out. Departments are also the unit most permissions are scoped to — what a crew member can see is usually a function of which department they're on.

The production graph

Underneath the app is a single graph: scenes, characters, locations, props, and every other asset, connected to the departments that own them and the scenes they appear in. A schedule change, a script revision, or a new asset version is a change to this same graph — not a copy of it living in a spreadsheet somewhere — which is what keeps the rest of the product in sync without anyone re-entering the same fact twice.

Breaking down the script and what you tell us

Dropping pages on the Script screen starts breaking down the script: Throughline works through the pages and puts what it finds on the board — scenes, characters, locations, and the elements each department owns.

The breakdown is the first thing on that screen and it stays there. When nothing is running it is one line: which pages are on the board, when they were broken down and what came of them, with Re-read these pages and Break down new pages beside it. While it runs it says which of two things it is doing: Checking the pages, the short look first, where anything we cannot decide on our own is asked; then Breaking down the script, with the part it has reached underneath. A breakdown that is waiting for an answer or has stopped opens in that same place, so there is one spot to look. Earlier attempts sit under it in Read history.

Before the breakdown starts, Throughline checks the pages and asks anything it cannot decide on its own — whether two names are one performer, how something should be filed — on the screen you started from. Nothing is written down until you answer, and a question left undecided writes nothing.

What you've told us about this show is one list of the instructions the pages are read against, whether they came from a note you wrote, from a question you answered, or from a standing rule about a department. Each one says what it does and what it covers. Your note sits above the list as a reference; where an instruction came from, whose it is and when it was added are one press away.

Telling us the same thing twice does not store it twice. When two instructions read alike, Throughline shows you both and the words that differ and asks which you want — it never merges them for you, because two sentences that look alike can mean different scopes.

Approvals

An approval is a structured decision chain — who has to sign off on something, in what order, and what happens when they do (or ask for changes). Approvals gate the things that shouldn't move without a person accountable for them: a locked cut, a hero prop build, a delivery going out the door.

Budgets and POs

Each department works against its own budget envelope, broken down into line items and tracked against actual spend. Purchase orders are how committed spend gets recorded against a line before it shows up as an invoice — so the budget picture reflects what's already promised, not just what's already paid.

Call sheets and day-outs

Call sheets are the day's shooting plan — call times, locations, scenes, who's needed and when — generated from the schedule rather than assembled by hand. Day-out-of-days (DOODs) track which cast and crew are needed on which shoot days across the whole schedule, so a wardrobe or scheduling question about "when is this actor working" has one place to look.

The Assistant

Every department — and the production as a whole — has an assistant that works over the graph. It can answer questions about the state of the show, draft notes, and, when given the authority to, take action: creating an asset, moving a step on an approval, filing a note against a scene. It always acts as the delegate of an accountable person, never as an independent actor.