Manage actors and cast them to characters

A character is a part in the script. An actor is the person playing it. SceneMatch keeps them as two different things, and that separation earns its keep the first time someone doubles a role, or an actor is recast between drafts.

The actor list

Actors belong to the production and have their own page: a name, a photo, and the physical details the production needs — height and the rest of the measurements departments ask for.

The photo is worth adding. On the day, a name in a list is less useful than a face, particularly for background and day players nobody in the office has met.

Names must be unique within the production — renaming an actor onto a name already in use is rejected rather than creating two entries for the same person.

Casting

Assign an actor to a character from the character's profile. You can pick someone already on the list, or create a new actor while assigning — which is the usual path in practice, because casting is decided one part at a time rather than by building a cast list up front.

Once assigned, the character shows who is playing it, and the actor's details are reachable from the part.

The actor's page carries the same row of neighbours as a character's does: the actors either side in the list, click or swipe to move, or ← and → from the keyboard. Adding measurements to a cast of forty is one page, not forty trips through the list.

When is this actor actually working?

The actor's page answers that from the schedule rather than from anyone's memory. It collects every shooting day the parts they play are called on, and shows them two ways: a Day Out of Days strip and a calendar of the same days.

Because it works from the parts, an actor doubling two roles who is called for both on the same day is working one day, not two. That is how they are booked and how they are paid, and it is the number that would otherwise be wrong.

Reading the strip

Day Out of Days is the cast schedule the AD department works from, one row per performer. The row starts on their first call and ends on their last, and every shooting day in between carries a code:

• SW — start work, their first day
• W — a day they are called
• H — hold: the production shoots, they do not
• WF — work finish, their last day
• SWF — a day player, whose first and last day are the same

The strip ends with the numbers a deal is written against: work, hold, and the total the performer is booked for. Days before their start and after their finish are not in the row at all — they are not on the schedule yet, or they are done.

Why hold days are the point

A gap between an actor's first and last day is not free time. The production is shooting that day and holding the performer, usually paying for it, and those days are what a booking is actually made of.

This is the reason the strip exists next to the calendar rather than instead of it. A calendar draws a hold day as an empty square, indistinguishable from a day nobody is working. The strip names it H and counts it, so twelve days of work and fifteen days booked stop being the same sentence.

The actor's PDF carries the same row and the same totals, which makes it the sheet to hand to an agent or to production accounting.

Why not just put the name on the character?

Because the two change independently, and at different times.

• A recast changes the actor while the part stays the same. With them separate, you swap the assignment; everything built on the character — looks, continuity, scene attachments — is untouched.
• Doubling has one actor playing two parts. Two characters, one actor, and each part keeps its own continuity.
• A character merge combines two parts that turned out to be one. The casting comes along with it.

If the actor's name lived on the character, each of those would mean editing continuity records rather than a single assignment.

The thing that is not obvious

Deleting an actor does not delete the characters they play. The parts remain, simply uncast, with all their looks and continuity intact — which is the right behaviour when someone drops out and has to be replaced.

The reverse is not true: deleting a character deletes the part and everything attached to it, whether or not an actor is assigned. If a part is being recast rather than cut, change the assignment; do not delete the character.

Keeping the list honest

The actor list is one of the few parts of a production with no automatic source — nothing extracts it from the script, because scripts do not name actors. It is worth a pass after casting is locked, and again before the shoot, since an out-of-date cast list is the sort of thing nobody notices until a call sheet goes out with the wrong name on it.