Soldum: the Filmanize alternative that does not stop at the call sheet

Filmanize is published in the United Kingdom and aims first at independent productions. Its public material is explicit about the scope: upload a screenplay and get a breakdown, with an optional automatic AI pass; match actors to roles; track a budget against rate cards; get a suggested shooting schedule; and produce call sheets from the scenes scheduled for a given day, pulling in the required cast and items along with the location weather forecast, sent manually or on a schedule. The publisher was selected for the San Sebastián Film Festival Startup Challenge and publishes case studies from independent features. Nothing below claims that a tidy script-to-call-sheet chain is the wrong tool — that is ground Soldum works on too. The comparison is decided by what happens after the call sheet goes out.

This is the distinction that settles the choice. A chain that stops at the call sheet covers making the shoot happen, not the life of the production: before the floor there is a budget to put in front of a financier, during the shoot there are overages to see coming, and afterwards there is a cost report somebody will audit. In most productions those three steps end up in a spreadsheet, and that spreadsheet has no remaining link to the breakdown that fed it. Every script revision is then paid for twice — once in the preparation chain, once by hand in the costing file. Soldum holds the same material from the script through to the cost report: the breakdown feeds the schedule, the call sheets and the budget, and a change propagates through all three.

The question worth asking of any tool is how many others you still need around it. A chain that covers the breakdown, the schedule and the call sheets covers three documents well, which means the budget lives in a spreadsheet and the cost report lives in a second one — two files, two exports, and two chances for the film they describe to stop being the same film. The cost of that split never shows up on a feature list; it shows up as the afternoon someone spends reconciling a schedule with a budget that no longer matches it, usually the week a financier asks for an updated version. Soldum covers the whole chain from a single source: what the AI extracted feeds the schedule, the call sheets, the budget and the cost report at once, and a change made in one of them is a change in all of them.

Automation is only worth having if you can trust the output, and a screenplay is full of things a model can read the wrong way: a location named two different ways across forty pages, a character who appears only in a line of action, a prop implied rather than written, a night scene signalled by nothing but a line of dialogue. Soldum treats the AI pass as a first draft, not a verdict. Nothing is applied without your approval: you review the breakdown scene by scene, correct what was misread, add what the text leaves implicit, and the approved version is what the schedule, the call sheets and the budget are built from. That review is where the real saving is decided — it takes hours where manual entry takes days — and it is what makes every number downstream dependable, since three documents out of four flow from it.

In Soldum the breakdown is not an end in itself: it is the source the other documents flow from. A location extracted from the script becomes a number of shooting days, so a rental line and a transport account; a character becomes days worked, so a fee, the employer costs on top of it, and a row on the call sheet for the day concerned; a technical requirement noted in a scene becomes an equipment line in the budget. Those quantities are not copied from one file to another, they are read in one place. That continuity is what makes the difference in daily use — more than the accuracy of the initial extraction, because a correct but isolated breakdown still forces you to carry every change by hand into the schedule, then the call sheets, then the budget.

In preparation the question is almost never what the film costs, but what this change costs. Losing the week-three location, adding a night shoot, pushing the start date by a month: each of those is decided in a couple of hours, and the budget is only updated much later, when nothing is negotiable any more. A tool that holds the schedule without holding the budget cannot answer: a human has to translate the move into crew hours, hotel nights and transport, then type the result somewhere else. In Soldum the schedule and the budget are two views of the same material — you move the day, and the cost of moving it appears before you approve anything.

Cost tracking is the step most preparation chains leave to a spreadsheet, and it is the step where the gap widens. In Soldum every account carries three figures: the estimate from the approved budget, the commitment — a vendor quote accepted, a rental confirmed, a deal signed — and the actual, once the invoice lands. The alert fires on the commitment rather than the actual: an overage flagged as you approve the rental house quote still leaves a choice between renegotiating, trading off elsewhere and accepting it. The same overage found while reconciling invoices three weeks after wrap leaves nothing to decide. And because the accounts being tracked are the ones the breakdown produced, there is no mapping table to maintain between the schedule and the chart of accounts.

If your production touches France, two things stop being cosmetic. Budgets are expected in the standardised cost categories French financiers and the national film body use, with employer social charges and overheads on their own lines rather than folded into a single fringe percentage; and crew rates are set by a national collective agreement, with minimums that a template built elsewhere simply does not carry. Soldum builds both into the budget: the structure a French financier expects, and pay compared against those industry minimums as you cost each role. That is a concrete advantage on a co-production and neutral everywhere else — the rest of the chain, from the AI breakdown to the call sheets and the cost report, works the same wherever you shoot.

There is no data migration to orchestrate: Soldum starts from the script. You export your text as PDF or Final Draft, you upload it, and the breakdown runs. In practice the most common migration is not really one — teams try Soldum on the preparation of a real project, ideally one already finished whose final cost they know, and compare what it produces with what they built by hand. It is the least risky test, since you compare two outputs on the same script without dismantling anything. The table below sets out where to start depending on your situation.

Production companies, producers of features, documentaries, commercials and series, and line producers who spend their days keeping a breakdown, a schedule and a budget consistent with one another. If your need stops at running an independent shoot from the script to the call sheet, with no budget to defend and no cost report to produce, the argument falls away: a short, well-made chain remains the coherent choice. It is the moment the budget and the financing enter the picture that the gap becomes structural rather than a matter of taste.