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.
A script that four departments have marked up is a script nobody can read. Costume's highlights, the 1st AD's notes and the prop references all land on the same pages, and by the second revision the text underneath has disappeared.
Layers are the answer. Every annotation in SceneMatch belongs to one of three, and each can be switched off on its own.
The three layers
- Highlights — everything that changes how the text looks: highlight colours, bold, italic, underline and strike-through.
- Notes — the written comments attached to a passage.
- References — links from a line of script to an actual item in your warehouse: a prop, a piece of set dress, a costume.
Every mark you make falls into exactly one of these. There is no fourth category and nothing sits outside them.
Turning a layer off
Open the layers menu in the screenplay viewer and switch off the layer you want out of the way. Every mark on it disappears at once, across the whole script — not just the scene you are looking at.
The other two layers are completely unaffected. Hiding notes leaves your highlights exactly as they were; hiding references leaves both the highlights and the notes in place. Switch the layer back on and everything returns, unchanged.
Hiding the references layer also removes the small link icons painted after the referenced text, so the line reads as plain script again.
The thing that is not obvious
Hiding is a view setting, not an edit. Nothing is deleted, nothing is archived, and nobody else's screen changes. It only affects what you are looking at right now.
That matters because it makes the layers safe to use aggressively. If you are checking continuity, turn everything off except highlights. If you are working through a producer's comments, show only notes. If you are pulling a prop list, show only references and read down the script for the link icons. You are not risking anyone's work by doing it — you are just choosing what to look at.
A practical way to use them
The most common use is not focus, it is handover. When someone new joins a department mid-shoot, give them the script with only their own layer showing. They see what their department cares about, without three other teams' marks competing for attention — and they can turn the rest back on the moment they want the full picture.