Locking a script: scene numbers and coloured pages

A screenplay lives two lives. While it is being written, a change is just a change. Once a crew is working from it, a change is something a hundred people have to be told about. The app follows the professional convention for that second life, and the convention is not the obvious one.

Before a crew has it: drafts

Save a copy whenever a draft is worth keeping — Lock Version on the script page does that. It is a dated snapshot you can compare against and restore. Nothing is sent, nothing freezes, and you can save as many as you like. Renaming a character, cutting a scene, rewriting an act: all of it is still simply writing.

The moment it changes: issuing to a crew

When the script goes to a production team, the assistant director numbers the scenes, the schedule is built on those numbers, and the call sheets, the actors' pages and every department's paperwork all refer to them. From that moment, scene 14 must mean the same scene to everyone, for good.

In the app that moment is Issue. The first issue freezes the scene numbers. After it:

• A scene added between 12 and 13 becomes 12A — the neighbours keep their numbers, and nothing after it is renumbered. A page added the same way is 12A too.
• Changes go out as revision pages on the next colour — white, then blue, pink, yellow, green, goldenrod and so on, in the standard order — with an asterisk beside each changed line. Only the changed pages are reissued.

What the app leaves to you

Deciding when to issue. The script page keeps a line under the Issue button — "3 scenes have changed since Blue" — that stays true until somebody issues. A colour normally carries several changes at once, and sending pages to a crew is a judgement about other people's week, not something to do automatically after every edit.

Lock Version and Issue are both available from the Studio plan upward. Reading and restoring saved versions are never restricted.