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.

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.