Documentary pre-production software, from treatment to schedule

The mismatch is rarely about features. It is that a fiction tool asks for information the documentary does not have yet, and keeps asking for it. Understanding exactly which assumptions break is the fastest way to judge whether a piece of software will help or add friction, so here is the comparison in full.

This is the first question documentary producers ask, and it deserves a straight answer. Soldum starts from a written document in PDF or Final Draft: on a documentary that means your treatment, your shooting script, your development file, or a director's statement with the intended structure attached. The more the document describes situated scenes — who, where, under what conditions — the sharper the breakdown. A three-page statement of intent with no situations in it will produce a thin result, and it is better to know that upfront. The practical approach is to re-upload the document as it firms up, rather than waiting for a final version that, on a documentary, never quite arrives.

On upload, the AI splits the document into sequences and pulls out everything that carries a cost or a constraint: shooting locations, contributors and people filmed, the travel each one implies, technical needs, permits to anticipate. The output is a starting point you review and correct, not a finished deliverable — nothing the AI proposes is applied without your approval. On a documentary the real value is less the time saved on the first pass than the consistency held afterwards: when a sequence disappears because a subject pulls out, everything that depended on it moves in the budget and the schedule too, instead of sitting in a spreadsheet nobody reopens.

A fiction schedule optimises consecutive days: group by location, cut travel, respect cast availability. A documentary needs the same optimisation applied to separate sessions — three days in February, a week in June, a return in autumn because the season is part of the subject. Soldum builds the schedule from the breakdown, groups what shoots in the same place and recalculates the whole thing when a session moves: travel costs, accommodation and crew days follow. Call sheets are generated from that schedule, one per shooting day, regenerated whenever it changes.

Documentary budgets are not revised once, they are revised continuously, because the budget is also the document you use to convince. Soldum derives it from the breakdown, keeps estimate against actuals in the same view, and recalculates when the project moves. Categories, fees, employer contributions and overheads land on the right lines, and the whole thing exports to Excel and PDF. If you shoot in France or co-produce with a French company, one detail is worth knowing: the budget follows the standard CNC categories — the format the French national film body and French broadcasters expect — so a co-production file does not need to be rebuilt by hand at submission time.

On a documentary, preparation and financing are not two consecutive phases. The budget circulates long before the shoot, and it is revised as often as the financing plan. Soldum keeps a financing plan alongside the budget, so what is committed and what is still uncovered stay visible in one place instead of in a second spreadsheet. It also surfaces national and regional schemes that may fit the project — French ones in particular, which is directly useful if you are producing in France or with a French partner. Schemes and their conditions change: the tool helps you track the state of each application, it does not replace checking the eligibility criteria with the body concerned.

Worth saying before you open an account. Soldum does not write your treatment and offers no text editor: the writing is imported, not authored here. We do not cover logging or editing, which take up a considerable share of a documentary. We do not negotiate archive rights and hold no rate card for them: the line is budgeted like any other, from the amounts you enter. And on a project with no written material at all — a shoot started on instinct and carried over months — the automatic breakdown has little to read, and the benefit narrows to the budget, the schedule and the cost tracking.

The lowest-risk test is a real project rather than a sample: upload the treatment of a documentary currently in development and compare the breakdown you get with what you would have typed by hand. The first project is free, which is enough to decide. On pricing, the subscription is billed per account rather than per seat, so inviting a producer, a location manager and an editor costs nothing extra — the opposite of the per-seat pricing that pushes small documentary teams to restrict access to the very document everyone needs.