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.
On a production imported from a screenplay you do not create characters at all: SceneMatch extracts them from the script and they are waiting when the import finishes. A feature-length script typically yields twenty or thirty.
What you do next matters more than the creating, because every other part of the breakdown — looks, continuity, per-character props, the schedule's cast chips — hangs off this list being right.
Adding one by hand
Characters that never speak still need to exist: a stand-in, a background artist with a costume note, a late addition not yet in the pages. Create those from the characters page.
A character carries a name, a number and any aliases it is known by in the script. The number is the cast number the production uses on call sheets; the aliases matter because a script that calls the same person MRS. HOLLIS in one scene and MOTHER in another will otherwise produce two characters.
Principal or background
Every character is one or the other, and you can convert between them at any time in either direction — nothing is lost by changing your mind. Getting this right is worth the minute it costs: it is what separates the cast you are tracking continuity for from the crowd you are counting.
What the parser gets wrong, and why
Screenplay extraction is good but not clairvoyant. Expect to spend a pass cleaning up:
- The same person, twice — usually a name change through the drafts, or an alias the parser could not connect. Fix these by merging, which keeps both sides' work.
- Things that are not people — a heading the parser read as a cue. Delete those.
- Numbering — the script does not carry cast numbers, so they are yours to assign.
Do this early. Every scene photo, look and note attached to a duplicate is work you will have to reconcile later, and merging is much cheaper before the continuity exists than after.
The card menu
Each character card carries its own actions — edit, merge, delete — so the tidying pass can be done straight from the list without opening each one.
Exporting the cast
The characters page exports to PDF, which is the list most productions actually circulate. On a season there is also a character breakdown showing which characters appear in which episodes — the answer to "who do we need for the block" in one page.
The thing that is not obvious
Deleting a character deletes its continuity with it. The looks built on that character, the photos and notes attached to it inside scenes, its wardrobe and props associations — all of it belongs to the character and goes when it does.
That is why merging exists, and why a duplicate should almost always be merged rather than deleted. If you are unsure whether two entries are the same person, merge them: it keeps everything from both sides, and it is far easier to recover from than a delete.