Scenes, sequences and acts
The outline board uses the words the industry uses, with one rule each. Get these straight and everything else on the board follows.
| Rung | What it is |
|---|---|
| Beat | The smallest unit of dramatic exchange inside a scene: an action and the reaction that shifts the scene's value one notch. Two to six per scene. Never a pause. |
| Scene | One continuous dramatic event in unified time and place that turns a value. The planning card: about three pages, one heading or a chain of several. |
| Sequence | A header over two to six scenes driven by one objective, ending in a turn bigger than any scene's. Ten to fifteen pages, bound by its objective, not a place. |
| Act | A run of sequences ending in a major reversal. The act break is a one-way door. |
Scene cards are the ones that get written. Acts and sequences are headers: they frame the cards under them and carry no pages of their own.
Creating a scene card
Click Scene in the toolbar to drop a new card on the board, or drag a wire off an existing card's handle onto empty canvas and pick Scene from the menu. The second way makes the card and wires it into the flow in one move.
Editing a card
Click the title or the description and type. Both save as you go, and Escape puts the text back the way it was.
- Title. Short and specific, because you read it at a glance on a full board. "Mara signs the clearance" tells you more than "The inspection".
- Description. What happens here, and what it turns. This is the material generation writes from, so give it a want, something that resists, and what is different at the end. "They talk about the plan" gives it nothing. "Mara boards at dawn for a routine check, finds the forward hold padlocked, makes Tomas open it, and signs the clearance anyway" gives it a scene.
- Status. The colored dot on the card sets Idea, Outline, Draft or Final, so you can see how far along a stretch of board is.
- Kind. The dropdown on the card turns it into an Act or a Sequence header and back. A card promoted to a header stops being a scene the script is written from, so the stats line and the generate menu update with it.
The beats inside a scene
Select a scene card and its beats list opens inside it. Each row is one beat, in playing order: the action and the reaction it gets. Two to six per card is the working range, and the card holds up to a dozen before it tells you that more than that is usually two scenes.
Beats are not a summary of the scene broken into pieces. They are the moves the scene plays, so the writing stage plays each one instead of glossing the whole event in a paragraph. A useful card runs want, then resistance, then the turn.
The list is built for typing, not clicking:
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
Enter | Commit this beat and open an empty one after it |
Backspace on an empty row | Remove the row and put the cursor on the one above |
Alt with Up or Down | Move the beat up or down the list |
Up and Down | Move between beats |
Escape | Put the row back the way it was and leave it |
On a Mac the move key is Option. Hovering a row also shows small buttons to move it or remove it, if you would rather use the pointer. Deselect the card and the beats fold away behind a count, so a full board stays readable.
Headers and what belongs to them
There is nothing to assign. A scene belongs to the nearest sequence header before it in the flow, and that header belongs to the act before it. Rewire the flow and the grouping follows.
A sequence header wants one objective in its description, plus the turn it builds to: "get the manifest out of the harbour office, and lose the only person who could vouch for her". If a header's scenes are pursuing two different things, it is two sequences. If it stands over one scene, it is not a sequence yet.
An act header wants what the act has to accomplish. Acts run in classical proportion, about a quarter of the script, then about half with a midpoint that turns the story, then a fifth. Act three is never longer than act one. Television runs to its own shape, with an act-out on every act, and a short film is one question with no sequences at all.
Each header shows what hangs under it, so an act with one thin sequence, or a header with no scenes, is visible on the board before you spend anything generating it.
Deleting
Select a card and press Delete or Backspace. Its wires go with it. Hold Shift and drag a box to take several at once. The Start and End anchors are structural, so they stay put even when they are part of the selection.
Deleting a card in the middle of the flow leaves a gap where its wires were, and the cards after it show as unwired until the chain is joined up again. Wire the two loose ends together, or click Repair wiring and let the board rebuild one Start-to-End chain.
Cards from an older outline
Boards built before the ladder had one row of Beat cards, and those cards were already scenes in everything but name: one event, about three pages. They still open, read and generate exactly as they did.
On an older board a card reads as a Scene with a small amber dot, and the beats list is not available inside it yet. The banner on the board offers the one upgrade that changes this. It turns Beat cards into Scene cards and sequence markers into Sequence headers with their scenes under them, deletes nothing, and saves the current outline to Version History first.
Habits worth keeping
- Count cards, not ideas. About three pages a card means a feature is roughly forty of them. If your board holds twenty, the script will come back short, and the fix is more story rather than thinner slices of the same story.
- Make every card a distinct event. Forty paraphrases of twenty events will not fill a feature. Forty different events will.
- Give the antagonist cards of their own. Opposition that is only discussed is not applying pressure.
- Let the subplot have its own beginning, middle and end. A B-story that only appears inside A-story scenes is set dressing.
- Leave room to be surprised. The board is a plan, not a contract. Some of the best writing arrives when a scene refuses to go where the card said.