Welcome to Stencil! For those of you who don’t know, Stencil is a tool that helps filmmakers and visual storytellers like you improve the output of your work by helping you optimize both your story and visuals, as well as help you stay better organized during the production process. Stencil gives you access to story planning tools, shot planning tools, character development tools, location scouting tools, casting tools, and much more.

In this tutorial, however, we’re just going to focus on how to get started, so we’ll only be looking at the main projects page, which allows you to add new projects. If you don’t have an account yet, you can sign up for Stencil here.

Your First Sample Project

When you first sign up for Stencil, a sample project will be created for you so you can get a rough idea of how projects look in Stencil once they have a little bit of substance. You can browse through this sample project, and then when you’re ready, you can delete this sample project and add your own.

Projects can be placed in a wide range of categories, from feature films, documentaries, short films, commercials, music videos, and more.

Customizing Your Workspace

Keep in mind that Stencil gives you full control over the styling of the app. For instance, you can toggle between light and dark modes, and you can even change the app’s color palette by clicking on the color icon. There are some preselected colors you can choose from, or you can click on ‘custom colors’ to choose your own brand’s color palette.

As a rule of thumb, we suggest you use a darker color for your primary color and a lighter version of the same color for your secondary color. For example, if you were to look at a sample casting call, you’ll notice that the primary color shows up as the darker color and the secondary color shows up as the lighter color.

Adding a New Project

Back on the main project page, you can add a new project by clicking the “Add New Project” button. Simply give your project a title, select a category, give it a description, and then upload cover art for your project. Once your project is added, it will show up on your projects page. If you ever need to edit your project details, you can click on the edit icon.

Once you’re ready to start working on this project, you can click on the project icon or just click on the cover image of the project.

Tracking Project Progress

Before we dive in, I want to draw your attention to the little dots on each project. These dots represent the progress of this project so far as it works its way from the planning stage to the marketing and distribution phase. I’ll show you how to push your project through these stages in just a moment, but for now, just remember that you can always get a bird’s eye view of your project’s progress by looking at these dots.

Why Stencil is Different

One last thing before we click on our project: Stencil is a very powerful film production management tool. Each section within the app is kind of like its own app. For us, it was important to bring historically separated tools under one roof so you don’t need 15 different subscriptions to manage your project. Previously, you’d need to get a writing app to write your project, plot visualization software to visualize your story, casting software to cast your project, and so on. With Stencil, we bring all of these tools under one roof.

Not only that, but with each tool we give you an enormous amount of control over the settings of that particular tool. So to help ensure you never feel lost on most of the pages within our application, you can click on the expand icon in the sidebar to see a tutorial on how to use the page you’re on at any given time. So if you’re on our writing tool page, expanding this will expose a tutorial on how to use the writing tool. If you’re on our team dashboard page, expanding that section will show you a tutorial on how to use the team dashboard tool, and so on.

The Team Dashboard

Let’s go back to our main project page. We can always get back to our main project page by clicking on the “Projects” link. Now, from here, if we click on a project, we’ll be brought to the team dashboard page. This is where you can communicate with the entire team assigned to this project, from the producers and directors to the actors and the sound designers. On this page, you can post production updates, news, and so on. We’ll talk about this tool in the next tutorial.

For now, I just wanted to show you how to push each project’s progress forward.

Managing Production Stages

Notice the sections at the top of the dashboard. These sections represent the six stages of production. We start with story development and end with marketing and distribution. We can, for example, click on ‘story’ and then check these story development items off one by one as we complete them. Once the entire list of to-do items in this category is completed, this stage of production is also completed.

Let’s imagine that we have finished the first two stages of production completely. If we click “save” here, anyone with access to this dashboard page can see the real-time progress of the project so far.

Likewise, if we jump back over to our main project page, you’ll notice that this project has its first two stages marked as complete. So if you manage multiple projects, you’ll be able to see each project’s progress in real time here as well.

Global Studio Assets

In the upcoming tutorial, we’ll go through the other tools within the application as well. There is a lot to unpack here. For example, on the left you’ll see that you can manage all of your global film studio assets. You can access your entire database of crew, actors, locations, and so on. Over the years, you’ll build up large databases of people and places, and it’s helpful to keep these studio-wide assets in one place.

What’s Next?

So we’re going to stop there for now, and I’ll see you in the next tutorial. If you’re watching on YouTube, you’ll find the link to the next tutorial in the description below. Or if you’re already working in Stencil, just click on the demo project, which will redirect you to the team dashboard page, and then from there, simply expand the help section and play the next tutorial in the series from there.

That’s it for now—see you in the next one!

Ready to get started with Stencil? Sign up here and transform your film production workflow today.