Scene continuity — photos, notes and looks per character
Continuity lives on the character inside a scene, not on the scene and not on the character. That is the level where "what did she look like in this shot" has one answer.
Continuity fails at a very specific level of detail: not what happens in the scene, and not what this character is like, but what this character looked like in this scene. That is where the hair is parted differently, the sleeve is rolled the other way, and the coffee cup is in the wrong hand.
SceneMatch keeps continuity at exactly that level. Open a scene, open a character's chip inside it, and you are on the page that answers the question.
The three levels, and which one you want
This is the distinction worth learning, because putting something at the wrong level is why it later cannot be found:
| Level | Holds | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| The character | The general look per department, the profile image | What is always true — "brown hair" |
| The scene | Scene photos and notes | The room, the setup, the state of things |
| The character in the scene | Continuity photos, notes, the look worn | What this person looked like, here |
The third is where continuity belongs, and it is the one people skip because the first two are easier to reach.
Photos and notes
Add photos of the character as they appear in that scene, and notes about anything a photo will not carry — which side the scar is on, that the watch is running slow, that the jacket is worn open after the fight.
Both are attached to that character in that scene alone. Photographing Elizabeth in scene 4 says nothing about scene 5, which is correct: those are different moments and often different days.
These photos also feed back upward. A character whose profile image has been removed shows a quick image assembled from exactly these continuity photos — so the work done on set is what identifies the character in the cast list.
The look worn
Alongside the photos, each department tab — hair, makeup, costume — records which look the character is wearing in this scene.
Attaching a look here brings its photos with it, so the reference and the record sit side by side: this is the look as designed, and these are the photos of it as shot. Detaching removes it from this scene only and leaves the look itself untouched.
A character can wear one look per department in a scene. That is why a look's continuity picker shrinks as you attach scenes to it — the two ends are the same constraint seen from opposite sides.
Getting it out
The scene character breakdown exports to PDF: one character, one scene, everything recorded. This is what gets carried, printed or sent when someone needs to match a setup and is not sitting in front of the app.
The thing that is not obvious
Continuity is per scene, not per shooting day. Two scenes shot on the same day are two separate continuity records, and a scene shot across two days is still one record.
That is deliberate: continuity has to match the story, not the schedule. If a scene is picked up three weeks later, the record you need is the one attached to the scene — and it is still there, unchanged by everything that has been shot in between.
A workflow that survives contact with a set
Photograph the character in the scene, on the character's chip within that scene, before the first take. It takes seconds and it is the only record that answers the question later. Notes can be added afterwards from the same page; photographs cannot be taken retrospectively.