The three-ring binder, and what it costs

For a make-up artist, hair stylist or costumer, managing scene continuity well is critical — and for most productions it still lives in a three-ring binder. There is a reason for that. We are physical people: if you can touch it, it is real. Stored on a phone or a computer, it is "somewhere", and somewhere is not the same as in your hands.

But the binder has costs that only show up when it is too late. There is one of it. It is in one place at a time, which is rarely the place you need it. It can be lost, damaged or read by anyone who picks it up. And when it is not a binder it is a photo album, a notebook, or — worse — a chat group, where a production's confidential material sits on somebody else's servers with no way to take it back. Those problems are what SceneMatch was built to solve.

How SceneMatch works

It starts from your script

Upload a screenplay and SceneMatch builds the structure for you: scenes, characters and locations, ready to refine. That is the production set up in one step rather than a week of typing. See importing a screenplay.

Your team, and what each person can see

Invite the crew by email and give each person a department and a role. A Manager can change anything about the production; an Editor can build and change the breakdown; a Contributor can add photos and notes and mark scenes filmed — which is the right role for most working crew; a Subscriber can only look. Departments decide which parts of the production a role applies to, and a production-level setting decides whether departments can see each other's work at all. There is no limit on team size and members never pay. See roles, departments and who can see what.

Continuity where it actually happens

Photograph a character in the scene you are shooting, from that character inside that scene, and add whatever a photograph will not carry — which sleeve is rolled, which side the scar is on. Three weeks later, on another continent, anyone authorised opens the same record and sees the same thing. See scene continuity.

When the script changes — and it will

New pages are where prep usually goes to die. SceneMatch treats a revision as a merge rather than a re-import: you see exactly what is new, changed and gone before anything is applied, and your filming states, script days and continuity survive it. See handling screenplay revisions.

Everything else a production tracks

Continuity is not only hair, make-up and costume. Props, vehicles, animals, wardrobe and set dress each get an inventory with photographs and the scenes they appear in; sets carry their locations; script days say which scenes are the same story day; and the shooting schedule ties it to the days you actually shoot.

In short

Holding the information in your hand is reassuring, but it is one copy, in one place, easy to lose and impossible to control. Software answers most of that, and the cloud adds the part that matters most on a production: everyone looking at the same record, on a phone, a tablet or a laptop, wherever they are. SceneMatch does that and tries to stay out of the way — posting should be fast and finding should be faster, so you spend your attention on the job rather than on the app.

Why not give it a try now. It's free to test, play with, see what it offers and how easy it is to get rid of prints, notes on books, sharing information on chat apps and social services.

Registration to SceneMatch is free for anyone that wishes to test the application.

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