Everywhere the film happens, taken from its own scene headings — and, beside that, what you know about each place that a heading has no room to say.
Story ▸ Settings, next to the cast, and built the same way: the list is down the left, and the place you pick from it fills the rest of the page.
Every scene heading names a place. The list is those places, in the order the script first visits them, and there is no step where you register one.
Pick a place and you get, for it:
| Figure | Reads |
|---|---|
| Scenes | How many scenes are played there. |
| First / Last | The scene it first appears in and the one it last appears in — a place used twice at opposite ends of the film reads differently from one used twice in a row. |
| Played |
Inside, outside, or both, from the INT. and
EXT. of the headings.
|
| At | The times of day it is played at, where the headings give any. |
| Who speaks here | Everybody with a line in the place. Cues only — somebody named in an action line is in the room, but the script has not committed to them speaking in it. |
None of this is entered. It is counted from the screenplay, so it cannot be out of date, and it changes as you write.
There is no hierarchy. PALAZZO - ENTRANCE HALL and
PALAZZO - STAIRCASE are two places rather than one place
with two rooms.
They are lit differently, dressed differently and scheduled separately, and a writer looking for the staircase scene is looking for the staircase. Grouping them would also mean deciding where a name stops being the building and starts being the room — a guess about your script that nothing in the heading actually supports.
A scene heading is a place and, usually, a time, with a dash between them. Nothing in the format says which is which. Only convention does, and convention is in a language.
This app does not know the language you write in, and does not guess. It asks you once, and remembers.
Where a heading ends in a word nobody has ruled on, a strip appears above the list: A heading ends in this. Time of day?, the word itself, and two buttons — Time and Part of the name. One click, once per word rather than once per heading.
Until it is answered the word stays in the place name, which is the
answer that loses least. BOTICA - DIA is visibly unfinished
and one click from right; a room called DIA just looks like
something you typed.
They are kept in this browser and reused by every project in it, because
the answer is a fact about the language you work in rather than about one
screenplay. Rule on DEŇ once and every Slovak script you
write here comes apart correctly from its first heading.
A few English, Portuguese and Spanish words — DAY,
NIGHT, DIA, NOCHE and their
neighbours — are answered for you to begin with, so a script in one of
those languages is not a quiz on the first morning. They are a default,
not a ruling: each can be overruled in either direction, and a bar called
Madrugada is one menu item away from being a place again.
Every place in the list carries a ⋯ on hover, offering whatever applies to how it was read:
A project carries the answers its own headings depend on, and only those.
The bundle writes them as reading.json, so a draft you send
somebody comes apart on their machine exactly as it does on yours.
Opening a project teaches you words you have no opinion about and never overwrites one you do: a file does not get to overrule the person reading it. And your whole dictionary does not travel — only the words that script uses — so a bundle you send a producer does not carry every place name you have ever ruled on.
MONTAGE - VARIOUS, INTERCUT, and whatever else
your way of working puts in a scene heading.
Not a location on the row's ⋯ takes it
out of the list; it moves to a Not read as locations line at the
foot, where Read as a location again puts it back. The
scene still counts as a scene either way.
Unlike the time words, this is kept with the project rather than in the
browser: it is a judgement about this screenplay, and
MONTAGE might be a nightclub in the next one.
Six fields, and the count is the discipline. A location invites set dressing far more than a person does, so every one of these is a question a scene can turn on.
| Field | The question it asks |
|---|---|
| What it is | The place in one look. |
| Why here | What it gives a scene that nowhere else would. |
| Whose it is | Who has the power in the room, which is frequently the whole of who has the power in the scene. |
| Way in, way out | How people arrive, and whether they can leave. Some films are nothing but this. |
| What it costs to be here | The reason not to stay. |
| What it becomes | The place by the end. |
There is no box for the wallpaper. What a set dresser would want and a scene never turns on is deliberately absent — the failure mode here is the forty-field form filled in once and never opened again.
+ Add setting, and type it the way a heading would say
it: PALAZZO - ROOM. Somebody works out the cellar before
writing a scene in it, and that thinking belongs with the rest.
What you type is read as a scene heading rather than stored as typed, so
int. palazzo - room and
INT. PALAZZO - ROOM - NIGHT both arrive at the name the
script will produce when the scene is finally written. Stored raw they
would be three places that never meet.
Such a place is shown with the rest and marked only written about, with no figures — the figures come from the screenplay, and the screenplay has nothing to say about it yet. The ✕ beside it deletes it, and is offered only for these: deleting a place the script visits would leave it in the list anyway, minus everything you had written about it.
settings.json — what you wrote
about each place. The scene counts and who speaks where are not in it:
they are read off script.fountain every time, and a copy
in the bundle would be a second answer able to disagree with the first.
reading.json holds the time words this script depends on.
.fountain file is a
screenplay and nothing else. The headings are in it, though, which is
where this list came from in the first place.