How to Keep the Stars Aligned: Automating Actor Avails in the Stripboard
A few months ago, we watched a line producer quietly lose his mind.
He had a spreadsheet in one tab, a calendar in another, a stack of actor contracts in a binder on the floor, and an unopened text from a location scout about the travel logistics that just fell through. He’d just gotten a green light and now the race was on: budget locked, schedule awry. And he was stuck doing what thousands of others have done before him - manually rewriting a stripboard again… because one of the leads had a hard out for another project in Prague. and again… because another had a wedding to attend… and again…
Welcome to the chaos of actor availability. It's the one thing that matters to every studio, but no stripboarding tool handles well. Automatic stripboards look slick, sure. But without actor availability baked in, they’re about as useful as scheduling in-person meetings without checking if your team’s even in the office.
In film, time is money. But it's more specific than that. Time is built around people and when a key actor isn’t available, the whole production dominoes - shooting locations shift, crew schedules adjust, budgets spike. You can’t treat actors like static variables on a calendar. At a high production value, and across all major studios, they’re the one constraint that bends the entire schedule around them. (And can you blame them?)
That’s why we built actor availability as a core input, not an afterthought. In RivetAI, you can plug in known availability windows, hard outs, and soft options all while having full control over the stripboard for funky edge cases. The system responds by building smart, realistic stripboards that reflect reality, not fantasy.
The Enterprise Stakes?
At the studio level, it’s not just about “can we shoot next week?” It’s “how do we maximize our window while coordinating three international actors, one stage backlog, and a DGA deadline?” Our enterprise partners needed a stripboard that thinks like a line producer with 20 years under their belt, someone who knows that when Actor A is gone, Scene 27 is toast unless you want to eat overtime fees. So we layered availability into versioning logic, scenario building, and export flows.
Because real stripboarding isn’t just sunny travel plans and an organized day, it’s about not lighting your budget on fire. And with this layer being automated- it optimizes your budget, too like never before.
With actor availability integrated, RivetAI isn’t just generating a schedule, it’s giving you options - Plan A, Plan B, “let’s not tell legal about Plan C.” Want to run a scenario with a second unit workaround? Go ahead. Need to compress the shoot if a location falls through? The schedule re-renders instantly, reflecting who’s actually available. You stop reacting and start strategizing.
Our goal isn’t to automate everything. It’s to make sure the right things are automated at the right time so our line producer friends can make the most of all their resources and see their vision thrive. Actor availability is one of those things. It’s too dynamic, too influential, and too often overlooked in workflows until the last minute. So no, a static, rules-based stripboard will never cut it at scale. But one that adapts, one that knows your cast is your schedule, might just change the game.
TL;DR - A stripboard without actor availability is like a budget with no numbers. Pretty, but totally useless. Studios deserve better. That’s why Rivet makes sure your schedule starts where all good filmmaking does: with your people.