InteScene Tutorial: A Tour of Every Tool in a Project

An InteScene project covers a production from the first draft of the script to the end credits. Below is an overview of the tools available, and a brief idea of how they work.

Four groups and one database

Every tool in a project belongs to one of four groups in the sidebar: Overview, Development, Pre-production and Production. Overview sits at the top because you’ll use it all the way through, and the other three run in the order a film gets made.

All four sit on top of a single project database. Say your breakdown finds a Detective Holt in scene 12. Holt goes into the database as a character, Casting attaches an actor to him, the stripboard knows which days he works, the call sheet gives his actor a call time, and once you’ve wrapped, the credits generator already has the name. Every tool downstream reads from that one record, so a scene you move on the stripboard turns up moved on the call sheet too.

Overview

The dashboard gives you a live view of the whole project: script progress, shoot days, budget, tasks and recent activity. If you’re producing, it’s where you’ll see what’s changed since yesterday without opening every tool to check.

Tasks is for creating jobs, assigning them and tracking them, either as a list or on a Kanban board, with timeline and Gantt views when you need dates laid against each other. It’s most useful for the jobs that fall between departments, like chasing the council for a filming permit or ordering drives for the DIT.

The project database holds the people, places, props, vehicles and everything else connected to the production, and each entry links to the scenes it turns up in. Open the red Volvo and you’ll see every scene that needs it. You can fill the database by hand, though on a scripted project the breakdown can fill a lot of it for you.

The planning board is a free-form canvas for mapping ideas, story structure or early production plans, with sticky notes, images and live cards pulled from the database. Everyone on the project can work on it at once, and you’ll see each other’s cursors moving about while you do.

Development

The script editor handles industry-standard screenplay formatting, revisions and automatic pagination, on US Letter or A4. You can start on a blank page or import from Final Draft or Fountain, and export back out to either. Revisions are colour-coded the way a production office expects, and the page count keeps up as you write, which matters later on, when the schedule’s measuring each day in eighths of a page.

Script breakdown goes through the script scene by scene and pulls the characters, props, vehicles, wardrobe, effects and extras into the database. You can do it by hand or let AI take a first pass and then check what it’s found. It knows that “Detective Holt” and “HOLT” are the same character, so he only turns up in Casting once.

Index cards put each scene on its own card, so you can see the structure of the story and move scenes around. Every card carries a short summary of its scene, handy when you’re working out why the middle of act two sags and don’t fancy scrolling through forty pages to find out.

The script analyser uses AI to read the script and flag anything that may need another look. That covers brand names and music you’d have to clear, the expensive things like stunts and VFX, and notes on structure and pacing. Run it before the script goes out to heads of department and the budget conversations happen while it’s still cheap to rewrite the scene.

Storyboard turns scenes into panels. A frame can be an image you’ve uploaded or an AI sketch that uses your characters and the scene as references, so the actor in frame 14 still looks like the actor in frame 2, and you can sketch the composition yourself so the framing stays yours. Once the panels are in order, the animatic creator lays them on a timeline with lanes for voice and music, and you’ll find out whether the scene runs the length you’d pictured.

Pre-production

Pre-production turns all of that into something you can shoot. By the time you open Casting, the characters from the breakdown are already in it, and every scene is sitting ready to go on the stripboard.

Casting director manages roles, audition notes and availability. When you link an actor to a character, their availability shows on a grid laid over the shoot schedule, so a clash appears while you’re still moving strips around. Each actor gets a cast number too, and that’s the number they go by on every call sheet and on the day out of days.

Crew Up builds your crew department by department. Whoever you add here is who the call sheets list, and it’s the same set of names the credits generator works from at the end.

Locations is where you collect, map and manage possible shooting locations. Link a scene to one and you’ll see where the sun’s going to be for it. On a recce for a dawn exterior, that tells you whether the building across the road will have the street in shadow at the time you’re planning to roll.

Schedule puts scenes onto shoot days using a stripboard, each strip coloured for interior or exterior and day or night. You drag strips into days until the order works around who’s available and when you’ll lose the light. From the finished board it generates the planning paperwork, including the day out of days, which lays every actor against the shoot days and marks when they start, work, hold and finish. That’s the sheet your producer uses to cost the cast, because an actor on hold between two working days is still being paid on most deals.

Budget tracks estimated, committed and actual costs in whatever currency the production has chosen. Committed is the middle column, covering money you’ve agreed to spend through a signed deal or a purchase order that hasn’t left the account yet. Keep an eye on it and you’ll see an overspend coming while there’s still time to do something about it, since the actuals only move once invoices get paid.

Production

Call sheets and reports update in real time as you change the schedule, so a scene moved to Thursday at Tuesday’s wrap is already on Thursday’s call sheet. Departmental reports give each department the part of the day that concerns them, and daily dispatch sends everyone the emails that apply to them in one click. If you’re putting together your first, our guide to call sheets goes through what belongs on every line.

The InteScene Portal gives each member of the cast and crew their own view of calls, documents and updates on their phone. A supporting artist opens it and sees the time they’re needed, without hunting for their row in a cast table and cross-checking it against the schedule on page two.

The document manager keeps production files organised and has its own editor for drafting things like contracts, with export to PDF or Word. For kit there’s Equipment, which tracks camera, lighting, grip, sound and the rest, and lets you save the gear you always take as a package to assign in one go. At seven in the morning, when the caterer wants numbers and two supporting artists were added overnight, Catering is the one you’ll have open, since it handles meals, head counts and dietary requirements. Transport, drivers, flights and accommodation all live in Logistics.

The continuity tracker records visual continuity throughout the shoot. When you’re shooting out of order you can come back to a scene a fortnight after you started it, and the tracker holds the record of what it looked like when you left, which is why the video calls it the script supervisor’s best friend.

Check-in lets people confirm they’ve arrived by scanning a QR code, or you can check them in manually. It builds timesheets from those times, keeps track of overtime and turnaround, and exports the timesheets for payroll.

The credits generator builds the end credits from the people and roles already in the project. Everybody who’s come in through Casting, Crew Up or the database is in the first draft, so the runner who gave up three weekends for you is on the list before anyone has to remember them.

Which tools you’ll see

The tools in your project depend on its format, your plan and the role you’ve been given. Scripted projects use the script editor. Commercials, promos and music videos are set up as A/V projects, which use a two-column A/V script or a track planner laid out against the song. Roles change what each person sees as well, so a producer and a camera trainee on the same project won’t open it to the same set of tools. The pricing page lists what’s in each plan.

Where I’d start

Start with the script, even if you’re mostly here for the call sheets. Import it, run the breakdown, and spend ten minutes going through the database, because that’s where Casting, the stripboard, the call sheets and the credits all read from. Anything you correct at that stage is corrected everywhere downstream, saving you time instead of creating every call sheet by hand. Don’t worry, you can still go in and edit them manually!

Next up

Episode 1 sets up a production company, creates a project and takes a first look inside it, and it’ll be on our YouTube channel. If you’d like to follow along in your own account, there’s a free plan, and the paid plans come with a 14-day trial with no card needed.