Create and track scenes

On an imported production the scenes are already there — numbered, described, and with their characters linked from the script. A feature typically lands somewhere between thirty and a hundred and fifty.

What follows is mostly maintenance: adding what the parser missed, tracking progress through the shoot, and keeping the record of what actually happened.

Creating one by hand

A scene needs a number and a description. The number decides where it sits in the list — see how scenes are ordered.

The description does more than describe. Mention a character by name or alias and they are linked automatically, and you can create a character straight from the text if they do not exist yet. So typing the scene properly is also how the cast list for that scene gets built.

Filming states

Each scene tracks three states: not filmed, partially filmed, and fully filmed. Set it from the scene's own card as the shoot progresses — or, when a day wraps, straight off the shooting day: turn on Filming Progress there and every scene on that day carries the same three buttons, so a whole day is marked off in one pass instead of a card at a time. See building and running a shooting day.

Partial matters more than it looks. A scene split across two days, or one where coverage was abandoned at wrap, is the exact thing that gets lost between departments — and it is the state that tells the schedule something is still owed.

These states survive a screenplay revision, so progress tracked before new pages arrive is still there afterwards.

Omitting a scene

When the script cuts a scene, do not delete it. Omit it.

Omitting keeps the scene, its number and everything attached to it, and marks it as cut — the card dims and shows an omitted marker. It is a toggle, so a scene omitted in one draft and restored in the next can simply be un-omitted.

This mirrors how scripts handle it: an omitted scene keeps its number so the numbering around it does not shift. Deleting the scene instead would free the number and lose the continuity, which is almost never what a cut means.

Active scenes, and what the counts mean

Every scene count in the app — the number under a page title, the scenes card on an episode, the progress bar on an episode card — counts active scenes: everything except the ones you have omitted.

An omitted scene is still listed by default, still numbered, still carrying its photos and continuity. It simply stops counting toward anything. That is what makes the numbers usable: a script that cuts twelve of its seventy scenes is a seventy-scene document and a fifty-eight-scene shoot, and the progress bar has to be a fraction of the second number or it can never reach 100%.

So the list and the count deliberately disagree, and both are right. If you want the full picture, read the list; if you want to know how much is left to shoot, read the count — or switch the omitted scenes off in the filter, which makes the list agree with the count.

Narrowing the list

The filter is a set of switches, all on to begin with: one per filming state, plus one for omitted scenes. Switch off fully filmed and the list becomes what is still owed; switch off everything but partially filmed and it becomes the list of scenes someone abandoned halfway.

They are switches rather than a choice of one state because the useful questions are subtractive — what is left, what is unfinished — and those need more than one state showing at once.

Omitted is its own switch, not a fourth filming state, and that distinction matters: omitting a scene sets it back to not filmed, so without a switch of its own a cut scene could only be hidden by hiding everything still to shoot along with it. Switch it off when you want the list to read as the shoot rather than as the script — the count above it already does.

While anything is hidden, a warning under the page title says how many scenes are filtered out, so a short list is never mistaken for a short shoot. Show All Scenes — in the filter menu, and on the page if you switch off everything — puts them all back.

The filter stays as you left it. Come back to a scenes list tomorrow and it is still narrowed the same way, which is the point: if you are working through what is left to shoot, you should not have to set that up again every morning. It is remembered per production and in the browser you set it in — it does not follow you to another device, and it is not something your team sees. The warning badge is what tells you a list is narrowed rather than short.

Photos and notes on the scene

A scene carries its own photos and notes, separate from anything on the characters in it. This is the place for the room, the setup, the state of things — what the scene looked like, rather than what someone in it looked like.

Notes can be edited and removed individually, and the scene card shows what it has, so the list tells you at a glance which scenes have a record and which do not.

For what a specific character looked like in a specific scene, see scene continuity — that lives one level in, on the character within the scene.

The character chips

Each scene card shows chips for the characters in it. They are not decoration: opening a chip takes you straight to that character's continuity for that scene.

The card menu

Beyond editing, each scene card offers:

• Clone — for a variant like 105A, which lands in its numbered place, not beside the original
• Omit — as above
• Move — reorder against the neighbouring scene without renumbering
• Export — the scene breakdown as PDF
• Delete — which is rarely what you want; see below

The thing that is not obvious

Delete and omit are not the same decision. Deleting removes the scene, its number, its photos, its notes and every character's continuity within it. Omitting keeps all of that and marks the scene as cut.

If the script cut it, omit. Delete is for a scene that should never have existed — a parser mistake, a duplicate — not for one the writers removed. The difference matters six weeks later when someone asks what was in the scene that got dropped.