Concerts, prize giving and graduation are the days a school is judged on, and most are run from a laptop with a slide deck and somebody whispering. Callboard gives that person a rundown, two monitors, subtitles in three languages, and one key that takes the next thing to air.
Nothing reaches the audience until somebody takes it. Arming the next item changes Preview and nothing else; GO puts it on the projector and moves every panel with it.
Mirrors: Callboard → crew control panel. Callboard is dark by design.
The rundown is the document. Each item owns its own media, its own subtitle lines and its own cue notes, and the panels that operate them are bound to whatever is on air. That is what lets the operator read ahead into the next item without moving anything the audience can see.
The camera is one control, not a layer stack: the picture is the media, the media with a camera inset, the two side by side, or the camera alone. Whichever is chosen, the subtitles sit on top, in output space, so they never slide inside a frame.
The operator’s panel, the audience output and the performer’s monitor are three browser windows from a single application on one laptop. Drag each onto its display and put it full screen.
The rundown, both monitors, the picture row, the subtitle column and the cue notes from rehearsal. This is the only screen anyone touches.
What the hall sees: the picture, and the subtitles over it in whichever languages are switched on. Blackout is one key.
The script, scrolling or pinned, a countdown to the end of the item, and messages from the crew that cannot be missed.
Two displays is a valid setup: the outputs work on their own with sensible defaults, so a school with a projector and no performer monitor loses nothing but the monitor.
One sheet, one row per line, one column per language. A sheet with the right headings imports in a single step, and the import checks the whole sheet before it accepts any of it.
A line with no Malay yet is imported and flagged, so the pre-flight list tells you what is still outstanding rather than refusing the sheet.
Re-importing the same file compares it against what is already there and reports what changed before anything moves. A correction from a translator at ten to eight is a retype, not a re-import.
A subtitle that runs to a third row on the projector is caught while you are writing it, against the real output frame, at the real size.
Size is set as a percentage of the output height, not in points, so the same show file looks right on a 4-metre screen and on a classroom projector.
Switching Malay on puts Malay on the projector, live, in the middle of an item.
Subtitles do not chase a timecode. A person advances them, because a person can see the stage.
Video, slides and PDFs are normalised as they land, not warned about at seven in the evening.
Callboard runs on the hall laptop, on its own, with no connection required on the night. Events live in a folder beside the application, so there is nothing to choose and nothing to lose when the hall’s network is not what you were promised.
Most of the work happens in the authoring screen — rundown, media, subtitles, script, cue notes — with a pre-flight list that names every loose end and links to the fix.
The pre-flight list is a list, not a gate. If you decide to go on with a missing translation, Callboard lets you.
English, Malay and 中文 — the languages the rest of Commun already speaks to your families in, on the projector as well.
Which event, how many languages, how many displays in the hall. That conversation is what shapes what gets built first.
More of the platform: Photos · AccessPoint HRMS · the school’s own app