Soldum: the Scenechronize alternative that starts from the script

On a production where two hundred people receive a different version of the same document every day, document management is a job in its own right, and a dedicated platform is the correct answer to it. Scenechronize grew out of that need: centralising the script and its revisions, distributing pages to the right recipients, recording who received what and when, managing access rights department by department, archiving the whole thing at wrap. It is studio discipline applied to projects where a single version mix-up costs a shooting day. Nothing below claims that a preparation tool replaces that function on a production of that size.

This is the distinction that settles the choice, and it is easy to miss because both families of tools sit in the same stretch of the calendar. A document platform assumes the documents exist: somebody broke the script down, somebody costed the budget, somebody built the schedule, and the platform makes sure all of it circulates cleanly. But it is that production work, not the distribution, that costs a production manager days. Soldum targets exactly that: you upload a PDF or a Final Draft file, AI extracts scenes, locations, characters, extras, costumes, props and technical needs, and you review a database that is already populated instead of typing into an empty one.

In Soldum the breakdown is not an end in itself: it is the source the other documents flow from. Locations, characters, costumes and technical needs extracted from the script feed the budget and the shooting schedule directly. Move a scene and the schedule recalculates, the travel budget follows, the accommodation nights adjust, and the affected call sheets are regenerated. That propagation 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 revision by hand into three other files, then redistribute all three. A document platform makes that redistribution clean; it does not remove it.

A call sheet is a derived document: it exists only because a shooting schedule says what is being shot, where and with whom. As long as the two live in separate files, every change produces one more version to send out, and the real question on set becomes who is holding the current one. Soldum generates the call sheet from the schedule: one per day, with the order of scenes, individual call times, locations and their addresses, key contacts and the weather forecast. It is shared by link rather than as an attachment, and when a day changes the sheet is regenerated without the link changing. The version problem disappears instead of being tracked.

Automation is only useful 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 only appears in a line of action, a prop implied rather than written. 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 corrected version is what the budget and the schedule are built from. That review is where the real time saving is decided — it takes hours where manual entry takes days, and it is the step that makes everything downstream dependable.

The question is not whether a tool is sold by subscription, but what the subscription counts: projects, users, exports. Document management platforms are sold primarily to studios and are usually priced case by case, which makes comparison hard and access uncertain for a smaller company. Soldum publishes its prices and bills the account, not the seat: Solo at €149/month excl. VAT suits a company preparing one film at a time, Studio at €479/month excl. VAT covers unlimited projects and invites the whole crew at no extra cost per member, and an annual commitment takes 25% off. A free tier lets you break down a first script before committing. On a crew where several roles come in for a few days, that billing unit changes the arithmetic: giving people access does not cost per person.

Better said before you open an account. Soldum does not write scripts and offers neither a text editor nor a storyboard: the screenplay is imported, not drafted here. We do not cover dailies, editing or sound post-production. Nor do we claim to match the depth of a document platform on the thing it exists for: tracked distribution of contractual paperwork to hundreds of recipients, with department-level access rights and a studio archiving policy. Soldum's scope is preparation, from the script arriving to the crew leaving for the shoot, plus budget tracking during it.

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 phase of a real project, breaking it down, costing it and scheduling it, while keeping their existing tool for what it already does well. It is the least risky path, 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 production managers who spend their days keeping a breakdown, a budget, a schedule and a set of call sheets consistent with one another. Soldum is built on French industry rates and budget categories — the standardised cost structure French financiers expect — which is a concrete advantage if you shoot in France or co-produce with French partners, and simply neutral otherwise. If your first need is tracked document distribution across a very large crew with studio archiving requirements, the argument falls away: a dedicated document platform remains the coherent choice, and nothing stops you preparing in Soldum upstream of it.