Track wardrobe across a production
Wardrobe belongs to the production, not one character: one piece, one photo set, attached to every look it uses — and Source decides where it goes back.
Wardrobe is where continuity is won or lost, and the thing that makes it hard is not the individual pieces — it is that the same piece turns up in several places. A coat worn by two characters. A jacket that appears in four looks across three script days. If your list treats each of those as a separate entry, your continuity photos scatter and nobody knows which is authoritative.
SceneMatch avoids that by keeping wardrobe at the level of the production.
One piece, one entry
A wardrobe item lives in the production's warehouse. It has its own card, its own photos and its own details — colour, brand, size, what it cost, where it came from — and there is exactly one of it.
You then attach that piece to the looks it appears in. Attaching does not copy it. There is still one coat, with one set of photos, and the looks point at it.
Sharing a piece across characters
Because wardrobe belongs to the production rather than to a character, the same piece can be attached to looks belonging to different characters. A coat that changes hands during the story is one entry attached to Elizabeth's costume look and to Cesar's, not two entries you have to keep in step.
Open the piece and you can see every character wearing it. Open a character and you see the wardrobe attached to their looks. Both views read from the same item, so a photo added in one place is visible in the other immediately.
This is the single most common thing people get wrong when they set up a production: creating a fresh wardrobe entry per character, and ending up with three "brown coat" cards whose photos disagree.
The thing that is not obvious
Deleting a look does not delete the wardrobe. The piece is production-level; the look only referenced it. Rebuild the look and you can attach the same piece straight back, photos and all.
The reverse matters too: deleting the wardrobe item removes it from every look that used it, across every character. If a piece is shared, deleting it is not a local decision — check who else is wearing it first.
Where a piece came from, and where it goes back
Source decides what happens to a garment at the end of the shoot, which is why it is worth filling in early rather than reconstructing it in the last week. Each of the seven sources has a different route home, a different budget line and a different consequence if the piece comes back damaged.
| Source | Where it goes at the end | What it costs you if it is damaged |
|---|---|---|
| Hired | Back to the costume house by a date — until it does, most houses keep charging | Replacement, at the house's valuation |
| Purchased | Back to the shop inside the return window, or into production stock | Nothing beyond the piece itself |
| Made | Production property; yours to keep, re-use or strike | The cost of making it again |
| Stock | Back to the company store it came out of | Charged against the store |
| Actor's own | Back to the actor | The production pays — this is the expensive one |
| Loaned | Back to the lender, with whatever was agreed | Whatever the loan agreement says |
| Another department | Back to props, SFX or stunts | Their problem becomes yours |
Source also answers a question that arrives late and urgently: can we get a double? A one-off hire cannot be duplicated for the stunt or the blood scene, and neither can the watch the actor brought from home. A high-street purchase can be bought five more times. Knowing which is which before the day is the difference between a problem and a phone call.
Supplier records who a piece came from and Supplier Ref. the docket number they will want quoted on a return. Supplier suggests names already used elsewhere in the production, as does Brand, and it is worth taking the suggestion: a costume house spelled three different ways across a season cannot be gathered back into one list on the day you settle with them, and that list is how you know what is still out.
Which copy is this?
Item Role marks a piece as the hero, a double, a stunt copy or a distressed one. It is not the same as quantity: three identical shirts where one is the hero and two are broken down for second unit is not simply "3". Role shows on the card, because two shirts photographed on the same rail are otherwise impossible to tell apart in a grid of thumbnails.
Bringing wardrobe forward from a previous season
On a returning series you rarely start from nothing — the detective still owns the trench coat. SceneMatch carries wardrobe across seasons through a predecessor link on the character.
When a new season imports a screenplay, it can match characters against the previous season in the same series and link each one to its predecessor automatically. You can also link or unlink by hand from the character afterwards, if the match was wrong or a character was added later.
Once a character is linked, its wardrobe page offers import from the predecessor: every piece that character wore last season is brought into this one in a single step. Import twice and there is nothing to do — the option disappears once everything has come across.
Imported pieces are ordinary wardrobe items in the new season. Delete the ones that have not survived the hiatus and add whatever is new; nothing is tied back to the previous season's copies.
Moving through the list
A wardrobe item steps to the previous and next entry in name order, from the buttons above the item or with ← and → on a keyboard, and what it steps through follows how you got there: from a look, the pieces in that look; from a character, that character's wardrobe; from the warehouse, everything. Checking a change has all its photos is one page and two keys.
Getting the list out
Two exports answer different questions. The wardrobe list is the visual document — pieces with their photos — for a supplier or a fitting, with a per-character version on each character's page. The Wardrobe Budget Sheet is the costed one.
The budget sheet is organised by source rather than as one long list. A hire is a weekly commitment that grows if the shoot overruns; a purchase is a one-off that partly comes back; manufacture is contracted labour. Added together they give a figure that means none of those things, so each source is totalled apart on its own page, ready to file against its own budget line.
Two things to know before quoting a number from it. Pieces that cost the costume budget nothing — an actor's own coat, a brand loan, something borrowed from props — are listed but kept out of the total spend, because a damaged one is a liability rather than money going out. And only pieces with an actual figure in Unit Cost are counted, so each subtotal says how much of its section it covers: "9 of 24 costed" means fifteen are missing from it. A blank quantity counts as one piece rather than dropping the line, shown in grey so you can see which figures the sheet supplied itself.
The budget sheet runs for a single character too, covering what they own plus anything worn in one of their looks. A piece worn by two characters is counted in full against both — one hire fee cannot be split down the middle — so adding every character's budget together overstates the production.
Both exports reflect the list at that moment, so run them after a revision rather than before.