A pre-production casting tool that reads the script first

Everyone already has a database of actors: a folder of headshots, a spreadsheet, the casting director's memory. What is missing sits elsewhere. How many roles does the film actually contain, once spelling variants are merged and background is set aside? How many days does each role represent, and over what span? What happens to that list when a scene is cut in a script revision, or when two shooting days move to another week? A useful pre-production casting tool is the one that answers those questions without being told — because the answers already exist further up the preparation.

A character list pulled from a raw script is always wrong on the first pass, and always wrong in the same ways. The same part is written three different ways across the pages — inconsistent case, a dropped accent, an article added — and ends up counted twice, so budgeted twice. Speaking parts named by an article, THE WAITER, THE MOTHER, vanish from filters that are too strict. And background gets promoted to a principal the moment a crowd is given a line. In Soldum that clean-up happens before you see the list: variants of one character are merged under a single name, speaking parts are kept apart from walk-ons and background, and any merge you make by hand is remembered so the next breakdown does not undo it.

This is the most expensive error, because it is silent. A role's day count drives the fee, the contract, the call times and the budget. Compute it twice, under two different grouping rules, and the role record and the day out of days end up quoting different numbers — with nobody able to say which one the deal was struck on. In Soldum both views read the same calculation. They also keep apart two things that are routinely conflated: work days, and hold days — DOOD code H, the days between an actor's first and last work day when they do not shoot but are still held. Plenty of contracts pay them; no schedule counts them as shooting days.

Casting is a pipeline, not a list: a role is identified, then searched, then actors are contacted, then negotiated, then closed. In Soldum that status lives on the role itself, and each candidate put forward for it carries their own — suggested, shortlisted, passed, selected. Profiles arrive three ways: entered by hand, imported from an agency file, or proposed by AI-assisted sourcing that searches public profiles and ranks them against the role's criteria. A suggestion is only kept when its source is genuinely cited by that search: without that rule, an engine that finds nothing falls back on the local database and offers a seventy-eight-year-old for a high-school part. Three weeks out, the useful question is never who is in the database — it is which roles are still not closed.

When an actor is only free for two weeks in March, that is not casting information: it is a scheduling constraint, the same kind as a location permit limited to three days. In Soldum an availability window set on a role feeds the schedule directly — every scene the character appears in has to fall inside that window, and days that do not fit are flagged. The tool does not arbitrate for you: moving a scene, renegotiating dates or recasting is production's call. What it changes is when the clash shows up — during preparation, while it still costs a phone call, rather than the night before the shoot.

Casting a minor triggers obligations that reach far past the casting office, and they differ by territory: a permit or licence, capped working hours by age, a guardian on set, and in several countries a share of the fee paid into a protected account until majority. The common failure is not ignorance — the casting director knows the rules — but leaving them in one person's head when they need to travel to the shooting schedule, the call sheet and the contract. In Soldum the age read in the script is what determines minor status; it sits on the role record and follows the character through the rest of preparation. Soldum does not advise on which authorisations apply where you shoot; it makes sure the fact does not get lost between two documents.

Casting ends in numbers, and those numbers are the budget's. Each role carries an estimated fee while you are still costing the film, then an actual fee once the deal closes; the day count comes from the schedule; the cast accounts follow, fringes included. In a production meeting the effect is very concrete: when a shooting day moves and takes a role from nine days to ten, the line moves on its own. Kept in a separate spreadsheet, the same change first requires knowing it happened — which is exactly what nobody knows when the schedule shifts three times a week. If you shoot in France or co-produce with a French partner, the fees are also checked against the French industry collective agreements, the sector-wide rate cards that set minimum pay.

Three families of tools compete for a film's casting, and they do not differ in how many fields a profile has — all of them store a headshot, an age and an agent's number. They differ in what they do with the rest of the preparation. A shared spreadsheet is free and immediate, but none of its columns knows that a scene was cut or a day moved. A casting database or a breakdown-service platform is built to find people, which no script analysis does — but it knows nothing about scenes, dates or the budget. An integrated chain connects the role list, the days, the availability and the money. Disclosure: Soldum publishes one of the solutions described here.

Better said before you open an account. No software casts a film: judging an audition, sensing a pairing, persuading an agent is the casting director's craft, and Soldum has no intention of replacing it. It does not run your audition sessions and it is not an open submissions platform for actors. It does not negotiate fees and does not replace a payroll service — it works out what the cast costs, not what has to be filed. It does not rule on what is lawful either; on employing a minor as on the shape of a contract, your advisor knows better than a tool does. And nothing changes in the project without your approval: AI suggestions go through a review queue, with their impact shown before they are applied. What the software removes is the retyping and the drift between documents. The rest is the job.