Import a screenplay and build your breakdown

Every production in SceneMatch starts from its script. Rather than typing scenes and characters in by hand, you upload the screenplay and the app reads it: each slug line becomes a scene with its location and time of day, and every character who speaks becomes a character on the production.

For a feature that is usually 90 to 120 scenes and 20 to 40 characters created in a couple of minutes, which is the difference between starting your breakdown today and starting it next week.

What you can upload

PDF and Final Draft (.fdx) files both work. A PDF exported from any of the standard screenwriting apps is read reliably, because the parser looks for the shape of a screenplay — scene headings, character cues, dialogue — rather than for one program's particular output.

Title pages, cast lists, scene reports and revision summaries are left out on their own — the importer works out where the script's own page numbering begins, so front matter is not mistaken for content.

What gets created

• Scenes — numbered as they are in the script, with interior/exterior, location and day/night read from the slug line, and how each follows the one before — CONTINUOUS, MOMENTS LATER, NEXT DAY — in a field of its own rather than in the location's name (see how a scene follows the one before it)
• Characters — everyone with dialogue, deduplicated across spellings
• Script days — the timeline you group scenes into, ready to fill in

You can choose not to create characters on import if you would rather add them yourself, which is worth doing on a script with a large crowd of one-line parts.

Locations named two ways

A scene's location is taken from its slug line as written, so a script that calls the same place two things — ELIZABETH'S VILLA here, THE VILLA there — imports as two locations. You do not have to fix them a scene at a time: rename the location on one scene and the form offers to move every other scene at the old name along with it.

What moves is decided by the old name only, matched exactly (capitals aside) — SceneMatch does not go looking for names that merely look alike. Imported, those two read Elizabeth's Villa and The Villa. To bring them together, open a scene at Elizabeth's Villa, type The Villa — spelled just as the other scenes already have it — and answer Yes: every scene at Elizabeth's Villa moves to The Villa, where the rest already are. Scenes at Villa, Elizabeth's House or any other variant stay where they are; each of those is its own rename. See renaming a location across scenes.

Capitals in location names

Slug lines are written in capitals, so the capitals a name really has are gone by the time the script arrives. SceneMatch writes each location with a capital at the start of every word — ELIZABETH'S VILLA becomes Elizabeth's Villa — and puts back what the shape of a word gives away:

• ordinals: 4th Floor, not 4Th Floor
• initials: E.D., P.O.V., D.C.
• Roman numerals: Etaj II, Title IX
• names after Mc and O': McGuire, O'Neil

What it cannot know, it leaves alone. FBI HQ arrives as Fbi Hq, because nothing in a capitalised script says whether FBI is an abbreviation or a word, and LA could be Los Angeles or the Spanish la. Correct it once — with the rename offer, every scene at that location goes along — and a later revision keeps your capitals as long as the script still names the same place.

Time of day is read in the script's own language, from the usual DAY and NIGHT to words like Czech DOPOLEDNE (late morning, read as morning) and POLEDNE (noon, read as day).

Revisions do not start over

When a new draft arrives you upload it as a revision rather than a new script. SceneMatch compares it to what is already there and shows you what changed — new scenes, removed scenes, renumbered scenes — and you keep everything your team has attached in the meantime. Photos, notes, looks and continuity stay on the scenes that survive. A scene the new draft has dropped is the exception: it is deleted with its photos and notes, and SceneMatch asks you to confirm before that happens.

The new draft does not have to be the whole script. Revision pages, or a single rewritten scene, upload as a partial script: the scenes in the file are updated, and every other scene is left as it is.

This is the part worth understanding before you start: importing again is not destructive, so there is no reason to delay the first import until the script is final. Scripts are never final.

Episodes

On a season, each episode imports its own screenplay and carries its own revisions. Create the episodes first, then import into each one — the characters are shared across the production, so a character who appears in three episodes exists once.