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 what its slug line carries: a number, inside or outside, a script location and a time of day. The number decides where it sits in the list — see how scenes are ordered.

As you type the script location, the field suggests the locations your scenes already use, so the same place is spelled the same way every time. Take one or keep typing — it is only a suggestion. The list comes from the scenes already on your device, so on a season it covers the episodes you have opened.

The description is optional, but it 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.

A few rules decide which characters a description links:

• The longer name wins. John Smith in the text links John Smith, not also a character called John. John is linked only where John stands on its own.
• A whole word only. Johnson does not link John, and capitals do not matter.
• Taking a character off sticks. Remove a character from the scene and they stay off, however often the description names them — until you add them back yourself.
• Every character you create is added. Creating characters from the description with Save and add more adds all of them to the scene, not only the first.

Renaming a location across scenes

The script location is the place as the script names it — the part of the slug line after INT. or EXT. Scripts are not consistent about it: the same house is ELIZABETH'S VILLA in one scene and THE VILLA in the next, or the writers rename it between drafts. Left alone, that is two places in every report.

So when you edit a scene and change its location, and other scenes in the production are still at the old one, the form asks right under the field — 4 other scenes are at Elizabeth's Villa. Move them to the new location too? Answer Yes and they are renamed in the same save, and the confirmation says how many moved. No, the default, renames only the scene you are editing.

What it moves, exactly:

• Every scene at the old name, across the whole production. On a season that means every episode, not just the one you are in — renaming a location in episode 3 moves episode 1's scenes too. Omitted scenes move along with the rest.
• An exact name, ignoring capitals. Villa and VILLA are the same location; Villa and The Villa are not, and a near-match is left where it is.
• Only the location. Inside/outside, time of day, script day and the scene's set stay as they were.
• All or nothing. If the save fails — say the scene number is already taken — nothing is renamed.

The question appears only when you edit an existing scene; creating or cloning one never moves anything. And it goes away again if you type the original name back.

The script location is not a set or a shooting location — those are attached to a scene separately, and renaming the script location does not change them.

How a scene follows the one before it

Slug lines often say how a scene relates in time to the one before it — INT. KITCHEN - CONTINUOUS, EXT. GARDEN - MOMENTS LATER. That is not part of the place, so SceneMatch keeps it in its own field, Continuity, next to the script location in the scene form. The kitchen is then simply Kitchen, the same location as every other scene there.

Wherever the location is shown, the continuity follows it in lighter type — Kitchen - Continuous — so the scene still reads the way the script wrote it. Imported scenes have it filled in from the slug line, in the script's own language too; leave it blank when the script says nothing.

This is not scene continuity, which is what a character looked like in a scene. This field is only about time: how this scene follows the last one.

A scene whose location still ends in - Continuous or - Later was imported before SceneMatch read this on its own. The next screenplay revision of its script moves the word into the field.

One thing to expect afterwards: a screenplay revision compares each scene with the new draft, location included. If the script itself still uses the old name, the next revision lists Location as a change on every scene you renamed, and accepting it puts the script's name back. Read those lines in the review — or get the name changed in the script too.

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.

Grid or one column

On a phone the scenes come one under another. On a tablet or a computer they fill the width instead — two to a row, three on a wide screen — which shows more at once but reads in a zig-zag: across, then down, with cards of different lengths leaving the next scene number somewhere you have to look for.

Layout, at the end of the buttons along the bottom of the list, switches to a single column: one scene under another, centred, in the same order as before. Press it again for the grid. Its icon shows which layout you are looking at. It is not offered on a phone, where the list is one column either way.

It works on every scenes list — a production's, an episode's, a script day's, a character's — and the choice holds across all of them. Unlike the filter it is not remembered per production: which layout reads better depends on the screen in front of you, not on the show, so it is kept for this device and browser. Your laptop can stay in one column while the set iPad keeps the grid, and nobody else on the team sees either.

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.

A character with no photo of its own shows the icon of its type on the chip — a star for a principal, two figures for a double, a group for background — and so do the small avatars a scene card stacks for the rest of its cast. A principal with a gender set shows the stock picture instead, as it does everywhere else. So even a cast with no photos yet tells you at a glance who is who.

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.