Breakdown Review — Locations, Scenes, and Items

Overview

Instead of importing every scene, location, and prop in one shot, a breakdown opens a guided review. The AI still reads the script and proposes everything it finds, but you have the final say at each step — confirming, editing, merging, or rejecting proposals. Nothing is written to the live project until you commit.

The three steps are sequentially gated: Scenes stays locked until Locations is committed, and Props & Items stays locked until Scenes is committed. This ordering matters — scenes pick a real location from the list you just confirmed, and item highlights anchor to the actual scene text committed in step 2.

Where the review lives

• A breakdown starts either from the prompt shown right after uploading a version, or any time from the Run Breakdown button in the Script Management header (which always runs on the latest version).
• When a breakdown finishes analyzing, it opens straight into Step 1: Locations.
• The Script Management page shows a Breakdown review in progress card listing the three steps with a Resume button.
• A slim banner appears on every project page while a review is open, so you can jump back in from anywhere.
• The three steps also appear on the Production Pulse pre-production checklist.

Locked pages

While a review is open, the pages whose data hasn’t been confirmed yet are locked for the admins who can act on the review:

• The Locations page is locked until Step 1 commits.
• The Scenes pages are locked until Step 2 commits.
• The Props page is locked until Step 3 completes.

A locked page shows a short screen with a button back to the pending step. Everyone else keeps normal access and just sees the “breakdown in review” banner — their existing data doesn’t change until the review finishes.

Step 1 — Locations

Locations are reconciled from the script itself — each scene’s slug heading — rather than from AI-invented names. Every heading is normalized into a stable key(INT. ALICE’S HOUSE - PORCH → alices house | porch), so the same place is recognized across drafts regardless of casing, punctuation, or dashes. Proposals are grouped so you only spend time on the genuinely uncertain ones:

• Matched automatically — provable matches resolve without a decision: a remembered alias, an identical heading, an identical name, or the same place proven by shared scenes (two locations whose scenes have the same content are the same place, even under different names). This group is collapsed with an Undo on each row.
• Needs your review — suggestions that aren’t certain. Each card shows the originating slug line, scene count, and candidate matches with a confidence badge and evidence (e.g. “shares 3 of 4 scenes”). Actions: Merge into an existing location, make it a Child of an existing parent, Create new, or Ignore.
• New locations — genuinely new places. You can pick a parent to nest them under, or leave them top-level.
• Not in this draft — existing locations the breakdown didn’t mention, shown with their scene count and date added so the original is identifiable. Keep, flag (“not in latest draft”), or delete.

Committing writes the locations (creating parent rows as needed), records your merge decisions as aliases, and unlocks Scenes.

Step 2 — Scenes

Scenes are matched to your existing ones by their content (a fingerprint of the scene text), not by scene number — so a renumbered scene keeps its row, shots, notes, palette, and comments. Each scene is labeled with what happened to it:

A change summary at the top of the step counts how many scenes were unchanged, renumbered, revised, rewritten, new, or cut — so you can see at a glance what this draft did. Any revised or rewritten scene has a View changes toggle that shows a real old-vs-new diff of the script text, so “the script is accurate and current” is verifiable rather than assumed. A renumbered-but-unchanged scene is labeled with its previous number.

You confirm each scene’s number/order, name, and description, and assign its location(s) from the list you committed in Step 1 (real choices, not typed-in strings). The slug still suggests exactly one location — the primary (starred) — resolved by slug key first so it survives AI renaming. A scene can shoot in more than one place, so you can add extra locations here by hand; click a star to change which one is primary. The primary is what the schedule and paperwork read. Committing writes the scenes and their full location set, records their script text, and materializes the item proposals for Step 3.

You can also add or remove scenes by hand. Hover between any two cards (or above the first / below the last) to reveal an Add scene button that inserts a blank scene at that position — you fill in its number, INT/EXT, name, location(s), and description. A manually added scene has no script text, so it won’t receive auto-detected props in Step 3. The trash icon on a card permanently removes that scene: a brand-new scene is simply dropped, while an existing scene’s record (and its shots and notes) is deleted on commit. Added scenes need a scene number that is unique across the list before you can commit.

Step 3 — Props & Items

The last step is a scene-by-scene tagging surface using the same highlight colors as the Script tab. It covers all breakdown categories — props, set dressing, wardrobe, vehicles, cast, stunts, extras, special effects, makeup/hair, sound, special equipment, and animals.

It opens as a full-height, three-pane workspace that uses the whole width of your screen: a scene rail on the left, the script in the middle, and the items panel on the right. Each pane scrolls independently, so a long scene never pushes the confirm buttons out of reach. Drag the dividers between the panes to resize them — screenplay text is naturally narrow, so you can shrink the script and give that room to the items panel. Your column widths are remembered for next time.

How it works

• A left rail lists every scene with a per-scene status (pending count or a confirmed check) and an overall “N of M confirmed” progress line.
• The center pane shows the scene’s script text with proposals pre-highlighted — dashed and dimmed while pending, solid once accepted.
• The right panel lists proposals grouped by category. For each one you can accept, reject, rename, or recategorize (e.g. move set dressing → prop).
• Select any untagged text to add a missed item. This opens the same tagging popover as the Script tab — pick a category, confirm the name (with existing-item suggestions so you link to what already exists instead of creating a near-duplicate), add optional notes, and, for art items, choose whether to also link the scene’s location.
• Accept all in scene and Confirm scene → next speed up scenes that are already correct.

When every scene is confirmed, the review completes and the Props page unlocks.

Re-running a breakdown

If a review is still in progress when you start another breakdown, that same review is restarted at Step 1: its pending item proposals and scene confirmations from the superseded run are discarded, while any locations, scenes, and props already committed in earlier steps remain. The Run Breakdownbutton surfaces this in a warning before you confirm.

Permissions