Create your first production

A production in SceneMatch is one film, or one season of a series. Everything else — characters, scenes, looks, schedule — belongs to it.

There are three ways in, and picking the right one saves a lot of unpicking later.

Try the demo first

One click creates a fully populated demo production: a script, its characters, scenes and script days, already broken down. It is a real production owned by you, not a read-only sample, so you can create, delete and break things in it without consequence.

If you have never used SceneMatch, do this before starting a real production. Ten minutes in the demo will tell you how the pieces relate, which is the part that is hard to guess from an empty production.

Feature film or season

The type is the one decision that changes the shape of everything after it:

• A feature film holds scenes directly.
• A season holds episodes, and the episodes hold the scenes. Characters and script days stay at the season level so a recurring cast is entered once — see building a season.

A season also belongs to a series, which is what links one year to the next and makes it possible to carry a returning cast's wardrobe forward. Series names have to be unique to you: reusing one is rejected rather than quietly creating a second series with the same name.

From a screenplay, or from scratch

With a screenplay is the normal route and by far the faster one. Upload a PDF or, better, a Final Draft (FDX) file, and SceneMatch reads the script into scenes and characters. FDX carries structure the PDF has to be inferred from, so it produces a cleaner breakdown — if you have the choice, use it. See importing a screenplay.

From scratch builds the production by hand: create characters, script days and scenes yourself. This is the right route for a production whose script has not arrived yet, or one you are tracking without a script at all — a commercial, a documentary.

You can add a screenplay later; starting from scratch does not close that door.

What gets validated as you build

Whichever route you take, SceneMatch enforces the things that would otherwise cause quiet damage later:

• Character names and numbers are unique, and names have to be plausible names — a stray + is rejected rather than becoming a cast member.
• Scene numbers are unique.
• Script day numbers are unique.

These are rejections at the point of entry, not warnings you find later, which is deliberate: a duplicate cast number discovered in week three of a shoot is a real problem.

The thing that is not obvious

Deleting a character or a scene takes its continuity with it, whether or not it is referenced. A character that appears in scenes can be deleted just as easily as one that does not — SceneMatch will not stop you, and the looks, photos and notes attached to it go too.

That is why merging exists for the duplicates you will find after any import. Delete is for things that should never have existed; merge is for things that exist twice.

After it is created

The production dashboard is the hub: every section — script, characters, scenes, looks, warehouse, sets, schedule, team — is reachable from it, and the production bar at the top follows you around the app. If you are not sure where something lives, the dashboard is where to look first.