Handle screenplay revisions without losing your work

A revision is the moment a production finds out how much of its prep was really filing. New pages arrive, and somewhere a coordinator starts re-entering scene numbers.

SceneMatch treats a revision as a merge, not a re-import. The new draft is matched against the production you already have, you are shown exactly what will change, and only then is anything applied.

Upload, review, then merge

Uploading a revision does not change your production. It produces a mapping — a summary of what the new draft means for what you already have:

• Screenplay characters / scenes — what the new draft contains
• New characters / new scenes — what does not exist in your production yet
• Updated scenes — scenes that exist and will take the new draft's content
• Kept scenes — scenes with no counterpart in the new draft that will be left alone
• Deleted scenes — scenes the new draft no longer has

Read that summary before you commit. It is the only point at which the change is still free, and the numbers are usually more informative than the coloured pages themselves: a draft that looks like a handful of edits can report 111 new scenes.

Cancelling leaves everything exactly as it was. Upload a revision, read the mapping, decide it is not the draft you meant, cancel — your production is untouched, right down to the scene count.

Deletions ask twice

When a revision would remove scenes, SceneMatch does not just apply it. The merge pauses and asks you to confirm, because a deleted scene takes its work with it.

If the scenes due for deletion have things attached — continuity, script days, characters — the mapping says so rather than showing a count. That is your signal to look before confirming, not a bug.

The confirmation is specific about what goes. Besides the scene count, it lists the images and notes attached to those scenes, and the images and notes attached to characters within those scenes. Those are called out because they are the part you cannot get back: the notes are deleted with the scene and the image files are removed from storage, and nothing in the revision history restores them. If that line appears, someone did continuity work on a scene the new draft has dropped.

A revision that adds and updates but removes nothing merges in one step, with no second prompt.

One thing worth knowing: a scene the new draft marks as omitted is not the same as a scene the new draft has dropped. An omitted scene is still matched and updated — it is flagged omitted and its filming state is cleared, but the scene stays in your production and keeps everything attached to it.

What survives a merge

This is the part worth trusting, because it is where the re-typing usually happens:

• Filming states. Scenes you have marked fully or partially filmed keep those marks. A scene marked filmed before a revision is still marked filmed after it, under its new content.
• Script days. An auto-generated timeline survives the merge with its days intact, and new scenes are absorbed into the days they belong to. Twenty-eight script days before a revision are twenty-eight after it.
• Characters. Existing characters are matched, not duplicated. Only genuinely new names are created, and the mapping tells you how many.
• Images and notes. Everything attached to a scene stays attached. A scene that is updated by the revision takes the new draft's content, but its reference images and its notes are untouched — they belong to the scene, not to the draft that created it.
• Images and notes on a character in a scene. The same holds one level down. What you have attached to a character inside a specific scene survives that scene being updated, and it survives even if the new draft no longer mentions that character in the scene — the character is not stripped out of a scene by a revision, so nothing hanging off it is lost.
• Looks. A look belongs to the character, not to the scene, so no revision can delete one. Looks stay attached to the scenes they cover through an update — and they survive a deletion too. When scenes go, the look itself is untouched, photos and details and wardrobe intact; those scenes simply drop out of its continuity coverage, exactly as if you had detached them by hand on the look itself.

Deletion is the only thing that removes attached work, and looks are its one exception.

Screenplay annotations follow their own rules — see what happens to annotations in a revision.

The revision colour comes from the file name

The revision colour is a field on the upload form, and SceneMatch fills it in for you by reading the name of the file you picked — choose Watcher_pink.pdf and the form comes back set to Pink before you have uploaded anything. The colour printed on the pages themselves is not read; nothing inside the script is inspected for it.

Two consequences are worth knowing before you name a file:

• Only the English colour names are recognised — white, blue, pink, yellow, green, goldenrod, buff, salmon, cherry, tan and ivory. A French draft named rose or a German one named blau arrives with no colour preselected. The script is still imported and merged exactly the same way; only the colour label is left for you to choose.
• It is a plain match on the name. The colour word has to appear somewhere after the first character — script_pink.pdf is recognised, a file named just pink.pdf is not — and any word containing a colour name counts, so a draft named after a character called Stan will offer you Tan.

The field is always editable, whatever SceneMatch guessed or failed to guess. Set it before you upload and the revision history reads the way the production talks — "the pink pages" — rather than as upload timestamps. If you work in another language, either put the English colour in the file name or just pick it from the list each time.

The thing that is not obvious

Scene numbers are how the merge matches. A scene that keeps its number is updated in place and keeps everything attached to it. A scene whose number changes is, as far as the merge is concerned, a deletion and an addition — the old one goes, a new one arrives empty.

So a renumbering pass between drafts is far more expensive than it looks: it is the one kind of change that costs you attached work. If a scene is being renumbered in the script, expect to redo its continuity rather than assuming the merge will carry it across.

Before you merge a heavy revision

Read the deleted count first. Everything else in the mapping is additive and cheap to correct. If that number is large or reads as attached, open a couple of those scenes before confirming, so you know what you are agreeing to lose.