October release roundup — No Script Project, Movie Magic Import, AI Dude on Budgeting

Until this release, every Filmustage project began the same way. You uploaded a screenplay, the breakdown ran, and everything else — the stripboard, the budget, the call sheets — grew out of that one file. It is a good pipeline when you have a script. Documentaries do not. Commercials, live events, and reality shoots rarely do. And a production moving over from Movie Magic has a schedule and a budget already built, with no reason to start them again from the script.

So the October release adds the other pipelines. A project no longer has to start with a script. Open Create or Import and begin from a Movie Magic schedule, a Movie Magic budget, both at once, or from nothing at all — an empty scene you build out by hand. The screenplay is still the fastest way in when you have one. It is no longer the only door.

The second headline is on the Budgeting tab. AI Dude now works there: it prices a budget against published rates for your location, tells you whether your target is realistic, adds a contingency or the right employer fringes, and shows you where every number came from. Budgeting was the last tab where you had to do everything yourself. Not anymore.

And because AI Dude can now read a budget you hand it — a PDF, a spreadsheet — the Budgeting tab picks up a third job: a converter. Ten years of Excel budgets go in; structured budgets that export to Movie Magic come out.

A project no longer has to start with a script

One pipeline became four. The Create Project button is now Create or Import, and the first thing the dialog asks is how you want to start: AI Breakdown (the default, and the same script-first path as before), Manual Breakdown, Import, or No Script. The last two are the new entry points, and neither needs a screenplay. Import and No Script are available on every plan, including Free.

That changes who Filmustage is for on day one. A line producer migrating from Movie Magic opens a project from the files they already have. A documentary team builds a breakdown and a schedule from an outline. A commercial production schedules a two-day shoot from a shot list. None of them has to upload a document that is not a script and pretend it is one.

The privacy line under the dialog applies to every mode equally, and it is worth repeating: your files are never used to train AI models and are stored securely on U.S. cloud servers; no one — including Filmustage — can view, edit, or share them. An imported Movie Magic file gets the same treatment as a script.

Start from a Movie Magic schedule

Choose Import and drop a Movie Magic Scheduling export (.mmsx). The project opens on the Script tab, named after your file, with every scene's heading and synopsis in place (no script text — an .mmsx does not carry it). Open the Stripboard and the board you built is there: scene order, day breaks with their dates, banners like Lunch Break, strip colors, Cast ID, pages, units (Main Unit, Aerial Unit), estimated hours, script day, and shooting location. A new Sort scenes: Schedule / Script toggle in the scene sidebar lets you read the project in either order.

This is the migration fear, answered. Day breaks, banners, and units are the parts of a schedule that take days to rebuild, and they are exactly what comes through. The trip also works in reverse — you can still export a schedule back to Movie Magic Scheduling when the rest of the team needs it there. Walkthrough: Import a project from Movie Magic.

Start from a Movie Magic budget — and tell it where the production is based

Drop a Movie Magic Budgeting export (.mmbx) instead — or alongside the schedule — and the Import from Movie Magic dialog opens as soon as the project is created. It is the same three-step dialog you reach from the Movie Magic Budget card in the Set Up Your Budget wizard or from the Import from Movie Magic button on the Budgeting tab, so a budget can come in on day one or any day after.

Step 1 — Choose file. An .mmbx export, up to 10 MB. Imported budgets and templates are always three-level.

Step 2 — Location & Currency. The new step, and it asks one question: where is the production based? Set a base location (country), a state if that country is the United States, and the base currency your file's figures are in. The location decides which published rates and fringes the budget is priced from — in the US those are filed state by state, which is why the state is required. The currency is purely what every figure is shown in; nothing gets converted. Every line follows the base location unless you give that line one of its own, and both settings can be changed later.

Step 3 — Map tag categories. AI matches your project's 14 breakdown tag categories to the accounts in your file — AI matched all 14 tag categories to file accounts — and shows the result as a list you can override: change the file category or account on any row, or exclude a row from the import. Then Import (N mapped).

You get a budget draft with a 3-Level badge and a banner saying you have not finished creating it yet. Finish Budget Creation loads the project's breakdown data — cast, locations, every tagged element — into the mapped accounts and unlocks AI Budgeting. Tick Save as template first and the imported structure becomes a reusable template for the next project. Step by step: Import a budget from Movie Magic.

Start from nothing at all

Choose No Script and there is nothing to upload — Next is active immediately. The project opens on the Script tab with one UNTITLED SCENE at one-eighth of a page, with Add Scene Before, Add Scene After, and (once you have more than one) Delete Scene. The heading, synopsis, and breakdown elements are edited by hand, because there is no script text to read them from.

Everything else is a normal project: tags, Run with AI Dude, Share Project, Export, a schedule, a budget. A documentary, a commercial, a live event, or a reality shoot gets a real breakdown and a real schedule without pretending a treatment is a screenplay — and anyone who prefers to build from scratch gets a clean starting point. Step by step: Start a project without a script.

AI Dude comes to Budgeting

AI Dude has read your script, built your schedule, and found your conflicts. The Budgeting tab was the one place it did not go — the place where can I afford this? still meant a week in spreadsheets. In this release it does. The same Run with AI Dude button sits on the Budgeting toolbar, the dropdown opens with Ask AI Dude anything… for a direct request, and a list of ready-made ones sits below it. Pick one and it lands in the chat fully worded; edit it or send it as is.

Ask the budget a question, or tell it what to change

The list splits into two kinds of request. The first kind asks the budget something: Check whether my target budget is realistic, Explain where this budget's money goes, Find the lines in this budget with no price, How did the last AI budget run go? — or, in your own words, Is $1M realistic for this script? and What if we shoot in Georgia instead? The second kind changes it: lock every line you edited by hand, add a 10% contingency, change the base location or the currency, add employer fringes for the budget's location, sort the top sheet by cost, bring the breakdown tags into the budget, or save the whole thing as a template. There is an undo for the last change, and List everything AI Dude can do here when you want the full menu.

Behind the list, AI Dude prices a whole budget or a single line against published union rates for your location and production scale, finds the right rate for a specific role, applies employer fringes for your shooting location, and can diagnose a run that went wrong or show you how the previous one was set up. Lines you lock stay locked across later runs. What it will not do: change the budget's structure (two-level or three-level is fixed when the budget is created), touch a locked line, or work in any project but the one you have open. AI Dude operations use Dude Coins, as they do everywhere else. Full list: What AI Dude can change in your budget.

Tier sets the pay. Cap sets the total.

One idea in that menu deserves its own section. Production tier and spending cap are two different things, and AI Dude keeps them apart. The tier picks the rate cards — it decides what people are paid, so that everyone is paid fairly for the scale of the production. The cap trims the budget to a number. When asked to fit under a cap, AI Dude defers secondary lines rather than lowering crew rates, and it can show you the candidates for deferral before it touches anything.

Why we built it this way: a budget that hits its number by underpaying the crew is not a budget anyone can shoot on. The AI should be able to make the total smaller. It should not be able to make the people cheaper.

Every number knows where it came from

An AI budget with no explanation is a guess with a total. How this budget was calculated is the report that fixes that: a panel on the right of the Budgeting tab, generated for the specific budget you are looking at, that records where every line an AI run touched got its figure. It opens with the time of the last calculation and the one-line rule — every line an AI run touches records where its number came from — then three sections.

Agreement budget band compares the budget size you stated with the total on the chart and names the band it falls into under each guild agreement — DGA, IATSE, SAG-AFTRA, WGA. Rates stay on the band of your stated size; the panel says it plainly: nothing was lowered.

Where this budget's money came from splits the total four ways, biggest first, with the amount, the share, and the line count for each: Sourced — taken from a published rate card for this location, split into wage card and non-wage card; Curated — a figure from Filmustage's own rate library rather than a published wage grid; AI estimate — no rate card covers this line here, so the figure is the model's own estimate; Not priced — nothing could price this line, so there is no figure to show.

Employer fringes the AI added lists the payroll contributions attached to rates for your shooting location. They sit outside the total and are added on top of it, and a new run removes the fringes the previous one attached and puts its own in their place.

A line producer does not need the AI to be right about everything. They need to know which lines to check first. Not priced and AI estimate are that list — and when it could not price a line at all, it leaves the figure blank and says so, rather than filling in a number. The detail goes one level deeper, too: click a rate on any line and you see the exact agreement behind it.

Every union rate, one search away

The numbers AI Dude prices from are not hidden inside the model. They live in a new Rates & Fringes Library in your Profile, under Templates & Data, and you can search it yourself: wage rates and employer fringes by country, state, and agreement, each row carrying the job, the agreement and its edition, the unit, the figure, and the dates it is in force. For the US alone that is 1,759 rates across 687 jobs. Search gaffer los angeles and it is there — no rate-card PDF to dig through.

It works inside the budget, too. Type a role into a line and Filmustage suggests the matching union rate for the budget's location — Costume Designer in a Los Angeles budget surfaces the IATSE Basic Agreement weekly rate, with the agreement named next to the figure. Pick it and the line is priced from the same source AI Dude would have used. The library is where the Sourced share of your budget comes from; this is what makes it checkable. See What is Templates & Data.

Your old budgets, converted

Not every budget lives in Movie Magic. For most productions the real archive is a folder: ten years of spreadsheets and PDFs in a format nothing can import. Until now, bringing one of those into Filmustage meant re-keying it line by line — which is why most people never did.

Now you hand it to AI Dude. Ask it to start a budget from a file and it opens the Budgeting tab's import window for a Movie Magic file, a budget PDF, or a budget spreadsheet. The structure — categories, accounts, and their lines — always comes over. For a PDF or a spreadsheet, AI Dude first asks whether to carry over the rates and fringes printed in the file as well; those are read out of the document, so check them by eye before you trust them. From there it is a Filmustage budget: price it with AI, save it as a reusable template, or describe the structure you need and let AI Dude build a custom template to that description. And because every Filmustage budget exports to Movie Magic Budgeting (.mmbx) as well as PDF and Excel, the Budgeting tab now works as a converter in its own right: spreadsheet in, Movie Magic file out, one click to export.

The door for this is the Set Up Your Budget wizard, which now offers three sources side by side: From Scratch (pick a structure and a template), Movie Magic Budget (an .mmbx), and Build with AI Dude — from your Excel or PDF, or from nothing. That last phrase is the other half of the story. No file yet? Tell AI Dude roughly what the film will cost and it builds a full budget to that scale — two or three levels, your base location and currency, previewed first and ready to fill in. A folder of old spreadsheets and a number on a napkin are now both valid starting points.

Why it matters: the biggest barrier to changing budgeting tools was never the software. It is the archive. "All my budgets are in Excel" stops being a reason to stay where you are — and it stops being a reason to keep a second tool around just to produce an .mmbx. See Manage budget templates and Export the budget.

AI Dude, beyond the budget

The Budgeting tab is the headline, but AI Dude picked up three other jobs in this release, and the pattern is the same each time: work you used to do by hand on the page, you can now ask for.

It marks up the script. Quote a passage and ask for a highlight, an underline, or a strikethrough; recolor a mark; open a comment thread, reply in it, resolve it. When a revision shifts the text, it re-attaches the notes the revision left dangling. It also manages the layers your marks live on — create, rename, recolor, hide, share with the project or keep private. Two boundaries, by design: AI Dude does not draw — text boxes, stamps, shapes, arrows, ink, and images are placed by hand, and it can find or remove one but not make one. And deleting markup is permanent, so it asks before it does.

It reads the files you give it. Drop a file into the chat — a PDF, a spreadsheet, an image, a scanned page — and AI Dude reads it: search inside it, summarize it, or pull a figure out of it. That is the mechanism the budget converter runs on, and it works in any conversation, on any tab.

It edits the breakdown itself. Create an element, rename it everywhere it appears, move it to another category, attach it to scenes or take it off one, or delete it from the whole script — with a confirmation first, because that last one cannot be undone. Assign or reorder Cast ID numbers while pinned numbers stay exactly where they are. What it still leaves to you: tagging a word in the script text, merging two elements that turned out to be the same character (that is the Suggestions panel's job), and adding or removing a category.

Two smaller ones worth knowing. Ask what a new script revision changed, which tag categories it touches, and whether the schedule needs reconciling — AI Dude narrates the diff. And ask how do I… on any tab: it answers from the published Help Center, so the procedure arrives in the chat instead of in a new browser tab.

Also in this release

• Multiple Episodes, 5 → 30 — the Multiple Episodes Project option is now a checkbox under AI Breakdown and Manual Breakdown, and it takes up to 30 episode files instead of 5 , one at a time or in batches, with duplicates filtered automatically. Each file gets a Prefix and an Episode (S01 / e01), so a whole season uploads in one dialog. Available on Director's Cut. See Create a multi-episode project .
• Episodic production blocks — group episodes into production blocks , each with its own schedule and budget , and replace a single episode with a new version without touching the rest of the season. This is the first release where a multi-episode project is modeled by block rather than by season; we will cover it in depth once the Help Center guide is out.

The bottom line

For as long as Filmustage has existed, the script was the front door. It is a fine front door when you have one. This release builds the others — a Movie Magic schedule, a Movie Magic budget, an empty scene, a ten-year-old spreadsheet — and puts AI Dude on the one tab where you still had to do all the arithmetic yourself.

Open Create or Import, pick how you want to start, and get to the schedule or the budget without re-entering what you already know. Hand AI Dude the budget you already have, ask it whether the number is realistic, and open the panel that tells you why. That is the release in one pass.