Manage locations

A location is a real place: an address, a building, a stretch of road. A set is what the script calls a place: INT. KITCHEN, INT. PRECINCT.

They are not the same thing, and the reason to keep them apart is that one location usually holds several sets. A single house supplies the kitchen, the hallway and the bedroom; a studio supplies half the picture. If location and set were one record, you would be duplicating the address three times and maintaining it in three places.

What a location holds

• A name, which must be unique in the production. A duplicate is rejected, on creation and on rename.
• Photos — the recce shots. Add several and remove any that go out of date.

Locations page previous/next through the list in name order, so you can walk a recce's worth of places without going back to the list each time.

Attaching a location to a set

Sets carry their location. Attach one from the set, and the set then knows where it is — which is what makes the schedule answerable: a shooting day's scenes have sets, those sets have locations, so the day has addresses.

Because the relationship runs that way round, you generally create the location once and attach it to however many sets it supplies.

The thing that is not obvious

Merging two sets makes the survivor adopt the source's location. If you merge sets that are at different addresses, the result may not have the location you expect — see managing sets, where this is spelled out.

It is worth checking a merged set's location rather than assuming the one you kept won.

What a location is not

Locations do not carry scenes directly. Scenes attach to sets, and sets attach to locations. If you are trying to work out which scenes shoot at an address, the route is through the sets at that location — which is also how a location becomes a call sheet entry.

That indirection is deliberate: it is what survives a production moving a set from one location to another without touching a single scene.