Scene Numbers

Scene Numbers

While scene numbering is typically used when moving toward production, the Script360 editor allows you to number your scenes if desired. To set (or reset) the scene numbers, choose the Scene Numbers... menu item in the Documentmenu:

Upon choosing that, the Scene Numbers popup box is displayed, with options that allow you to number (or clear) the scene numbers, along with few extra settings options:

Note that the popup is split into two distinct sections: the scene numbering (Numbering), and the appearance of scene numbers in the script (Appearance).

Auto-Number versus Number the myself

Often, when initially writing a script, there is no real need for scene numbers to persist (i.e. 10, 45, 3A, 75AB), or frankly for scene numbers at all. If you do want them early on, you may want them to update automatically as you add or remove or move scenes. To accommodate this, we have the Number Scenes Automatically option, which will automatically number every Scene Heading paragraph starting with the number 1, updating all the numbers as you add new scenes or delete others. Add a scene and everything after it gets increased, delete a scene and subsequent scenes get decreased.

When you, as a writer, want to scene numbers to remain as they are so you can refer to specific scenes by number (when discussing the script with your agent or producer?), choose the Number them Myself and then, once set, scene numbers will stay the same once set.

The Keep Existing Scene Numbers option

In the real world, usually when you are rewriting close to or during production, you may want newly added scenes to get numbers such as 25A and 25B (leaving the existing scene 25 alone!), you would turn on this option, where new scenes get assigned A and B numbers (i.e. 2A, 2B) if they are inserted between existing scenes.

In practice...

Upon initial numbering (using the default settings), a scene in the script might look as follows:

Then, if a new scene was entered in the middle of scene 10 and the Keep Existing Scene Numbers option was turned on before renumbering, the script would update as follows:

Changing a single scene number manually

If your scene numbers are not set to auto-number, you can change the scene number for any Scene Heading, whether it currently has a scene number or not. To do this, be sure the blinking caret is inside the desired scene heading and click on the paragraph icon at the left:

At the bottom of the pop up menu, you will see the Edit Scene # item:

Choose that and you can set the scene number for the current scene to anything you want, including numbers and letters (i.e. 25A 30A-1, etc.):

When you change the number and click on the Update button, the script will be updated immediately.