SceneMatch Help

Guides and video walkthroughs for every part of SceneMatch.

Getting started

Your first steps: create a production, explore the demo and find anything fast.

• Create your first production — Start a feature film or a season, from a screenplay or from scratch — or clone the demo and take everything apart before you commit any real work to it.
• Explore the demo production — A complete production — script, characters, scenes, script days and continuity — created in one click, owned by you, and safe to break. The fastest way to understand how the pieces fit.
• Find anything in a production — One search box covering every part of a production — characters, scenes, looks, warehouse items, sets, locations and more — running against a local copy, so it answers instantly and works offline.
• Finish setting up a new production — The Initial Setup wizard walks a new production through its plan, its script or episodes, your department, your team and billing — and every step of it can be skipped and done later.

Script & revisions

Import your screenplay and keep it in sync as new drafts arrive.

• Import a screenplay and build your breakdown — Upload a PDF or Final Draft script and SceneMatch builds the scenes, characters and locations for you — then keeps them through every revision.
• Handle screenplay revisions without losing your work — Upload a new draft and SceneMatch maps it against what you already have — showing exactly what is new, changed and gone before anything is merged. Filming states, script days and continuity survive the merge.
• Import episode screenplays — Each episode carries its own script and its own revisions. Import with the episode, extract the cast automatically, skip the pages you do not want — and on a returning season, match characters against last year.
• Annotate the screenplay — Highlight, note and reference the script from any of the three places SceneMatch shows it — the marks are shared, so what one department writes is what every other department reads.
• Show and hide annotation layers in the screenplay — Highlights, notes and references are three independent layers in the SceneMatch script viewer. Turn one off to read the script through a single department's marks without deleting anything.
• What happens to screenplay annotations when a revision arrives — SceneMatch carries your highlights, notes and references onto the revised script and re-finds the words they were attached to — even when lines have moved. Here is what survives, what quietly disappears, and why.

Breakdown

Characters, scenes, episodes, script days and actors.

• Create and manage characters — Characters arrive from your screenplay automatically. What you do next — numbering them, marking who is principal and who is background, and cleaning up what the parser guessed — is what makes the rest of the breakdown work.
• The character profile — One page holding everything about a character — their image, their general look per department, the scenes they play, their looks, and the props, wardrobe, vehicles and animals that belong to them.
• Merge duplicate characters — When the same person exists twice — a name change between drafts, an alias the parser missed — merging combines them and keeps the work from both sides rather than making you choose.
• Create and track scenes — Scenes arrive from your screenplay with their characters already linked. Track what has been filmed, omit what the script cuts, and keep photos and notes on the scene itself.
• How scenes are ordered in SceneMatch — A scene lands where its number says it should — and when that is not what you want, Move puts it before or after its neighbour without touching the number. Here is how the two interact.
• Build a season out of episodes — On a season, episodes hold the scenes and the script while characters and script days stay at the production level — so a returning cast is entered once and tracked across the whole run.
• Set up script days — Script days are story days, not shooting days. SceneMatch can work them out from the script automatically — a new day begins wherever the clock goes backwards — and keeps flashbacks separate.
• Manage actors and cast them to characters — Actors are people; characters are parts. Keeping them separate is what lets one actor play two roles, and what keeps the cast list useful once shooting starts.

Looks & continuity

Department looks per character and per-scene continuity photos and notes.

• Build hair, makeup and costume looks for a character — A look gathers the photos, details, wardrobe and scenes that define how a character appears — per department, per character. Clone it for a variation, merge it when two turn out to be one.
• Scene continuity — photos, notes and looks per character — Continuity lives on the character inside a scene, not on the scene and not on the character. That is the level where "what did she look like in this shot" has one answer.

Warehouse & Assets

Props, vehicles, animals, wardrobe and set dress inventory with photos and exports.

• Track props across a production — Props live in the production's warehouse with their own photos, and attach to the scenes they appear in — or to a character within a scene, which is what makes a hand prop different from a set prop.
• Track vehicles across a production — Picture cars, background traffic and the hero motorbike, each with photos and the scenes it appears in — so transport knows which vehicle is needed on which day.
• Track animals across a production — The hero dog, the horses, the pigeons in scene 14 — inventoried with photos, handler details and the scenes they are booked for, so welfare and wrangling can be scheduled properly.
• Track wardrobe across a production — Wardrobe in SceneMatch belongs to the production, not to one character — so a coat worn by two actors is one piece with one photo set, attached to as many looks as it appears in.

Sets & locations

Where scenes happen: sets, their locations and set dress.

• Manage sets and their dressing — A set is where scenes happen — with its own photos, its location, the scenes shot there and the set dress that fills it. Merge two when the same place ends up in the list twice.
• Manage locations — A location is the place you drive to; a set is what the script calls it. Keeping them separate is what lets one location hold several sets — and what makes a recce photo useful to more than one department.

Shooting days

Plan the schedule, track filming and log working hours.

• Plan the shooting schedule — Import a schedule straight from a stripboard PDF or build days by hand. Scenes move from the script list onto the days you shoot them, and the calendar shows the shape of the shoot.
• Build and run a shooting day — Put scenes on a day in the order you will shoot them, drag to reorder, add notes, and log the hours the crew worked — then export the day and its worklog as PDFs.

Team

Invite your crew and manage departments and roles.

• Invite your team — Invite people by email, give them a department and a role, and they join the production. There is no member limit and members never pay — only the production owner does.
• Roles, departments and who can see what — Access in SceneMatch is decided by two separate things — a member's role and their department — plus one production-level setting that decides whether departments are a boundary at all.
• High-risk productions and multi-factor authentication — A production can be marked High Risk, which demands multi-factor authentication on every single access and can watermark its exports — for the titles where a leaked script is the story.

Manage & export

Documents, backups, billing and your production cards.

• Manage your productions — Your home page lists every production you own or have been invited to. Favourite the ones you are working on, wrap the ones that have finished, and keep the list readable as it grows.
• Store the production's paperwork — Call sheets, contracts, risk assessments and everything else the production accumulates, in folders, in one place the whole team can reach.
• Back up a production — Generate a downloadable archive of a production — its breakdown, its photos and its documents — organised the way you need it, for delivery, handover or your own records.
• Billing and plans — Each production has its own plan, sized by the storage it uses. Only the owner pays — team members never do, and there is no limit on how many people you add.

Your account

Profile, plan and how to reach us.

• Update your profile — Change your photo and name.
• Your plan — How plans and storage work — see Billing & plans for the full explanation.
• Contact us — Questions, invoicing, anything — write to us.