Two things on one tab: what the script says about a character, counted from the script itself, and what you know about them that the script cannot tell you.
Story ▸ Cast. It sits with the story line, the treatment and the settings, because those four are the same kind of thing: everything a project holds that is not the screenplay. The list is down the left, and whoever you pick from it fills the rest of the page.
The cast list builds itself. Anybody with a character cue is in it, with no step where you register a name.
Select one and you get, for that character:
| Figure | Reads |
|---|---|
| Scenes | How many of the script's scenes they appear in. |
| Lines | How many separate speeches they have. |
| Words | How much they actually say. |
| Longest gap | The most consecutive scenes they are absent from — the number that tells you somebody has vanished for a third of the film. |
| Shares scenes with | Who they are on screen with, and how often. Below it, who they are never on screen with, which is frequently the more interesting list. |
None of this is entered. It is counted from the screenplay, so it cannot be out of date, and it changes as you write.
Under the list, the tab flags people the script mentions in action lines but who never speak. Sometimes that is right — extras, a photograph, a voice on the radio. Sometimes it is a character you meant to give a scene and never did.
Each of them carries a ⋯ with two answers. Add to the cast opens a profile for them, for the second case. Not a character is for the first, and for the shouted word that was never a person at all — it moves them to a Not read as names line at the foot, where Read as a name again undoes it. Nothing is thrown away, and the judgement is kept with the project rather than in the screenplay: it is about this script, and the same word may be a person in the next one.
A profile holds the thinking behind a character. The fields are deliberately few — a form with forty boxes gets abandoned at box six.
| Field | The question it asks |
|---|---|
| Overall description | Who they are, before the questions get specific. |
| Want | What they are pursuing, and would tell you if asked. |
| Need | What they actually require, which they usually cannot see. The gap between this and the want is the arc. |
| Wound | What happened before the film that explains the rest. |
| The lie they believe | The false thing they hold to be true. Most character work is this sentence. |
| Flaw | How the lie shows up in behaviour. |
| Arc | One line: where they start and where they end. |
| Voice | How they talk — rhythm, register, the words they never use. The field to reread before writing a scene. |
Below those, add as many custom fields as you like, each with its own label. Casting notes, wardrobe, an actor you are hearing in your head.
A profile does not belong to a name. It has its own identity and
claims cues — so one character can answer to
SARAH and MOM and be one person, and renaming
a character does not orphan everything you wrote about them.
Renaming from the Cast tab rewrites every cue in the script at once, which is the safe way to do it. Renaming by hand, one cue at a time, leaves you with two characters — and the cast list will tell you so.
You can add a profile for a character the script has not met yet. Working out who somebody is before writing them in is how most people work, and the cast list is where that thinking belongs.
Such a profile carries no figures, because the figures come from the screenplay and the screenplay has nothing to say about them yet.
characters.json, readable and
editable in any text editor.