Staging a scene
Fill in a scene's staging header, move cast mid-scene, and know what carries over into the next scene.
Every scene carries a staging header: the set it plays in, who stands where, the opening shot, and the sound bed under it. You edit it in the right dock, under the Stage tab, in the Scene staging section. Open the scene first, because the form belongs to the scene you have open.
Edits replicate live like any other scene field, so a collaborator watching the same scene sees your placement move as you click it.
Fill in the header
Pick an environment
Environment is the 3D set the whole scene plays inside. Choose one from the asset picker, or leave it empty and the stage draws its own plain backdrop. Built-in sets are listed alongside anything you have uploaded.
Put cast on marks
Each cast member in the project gets a row with six segments: FL, L, C, R, FR, and off. Click one. FL through FR are the five marks, left to right as the camera sees them; off means this character is not on stage in this scene.
Only placed cast are drawn. A member left off can still speak: the stage mounts them outside the frame so the portrait camera can frame their face.
Choose the opening shot
Camera is the preset the scene opens on: wide, two-shot, close-up, or over-shoulder. Each one frames the cast it names, so the choice depends on how many people are placed and what the scene is doing. Two characters in a confrontation want over-shoulder. A scene that has to show the room wants wide.
push-in dollies the camera slowly inward as the scene opens. It applies only to wide and two-shot: the tighter presets already sit as close as the dialogue box allows, and pushing further would crop heads. A camera direction later in the script also cancels the push-in for the rest of the scene.
Say how much the camera breathes
Handheld applies to every shot in the scene, the header's opening one and any a camera direction sets later.
still: locked off, the camera does not move at all. A tripod, security footage, a dream.gentle: a slow breath, barely there. This is what a scene that never touches the field gets.unsteady: a visible shake, as if the camera were carried at a walk. Tension, a chase, a bad night.
The breath is laid over the framing, never into it, so the shot still lands exactly where the preset puts it, and it fades back in after a camera move rather than riding along with it. A reader with reduce motion on gets still whatever you picked here, and no story can opt them back in.
Decide how the scene arrives
Enter is how the scene arrives. There are six:
cut: a hard switch, no cover at all.fade: in from black.dissolve: the last frame of the outgoing scene melts into the new one. There is no black, so it costs no waiting.wipe-left/wipe-right: a black band travels across the frame, in and back out again.hold-black: fade to black, sit there for a beat, then fade in. Hold appears next to the select when you pick it and sets the beat in milliseconds (0 to 10000, 600 by default). It is the transition for a time skip.
Every one of these except cut is motion, which is exactly what the reader's reduce-motion setting asks us to drop, so a reader with that preference on gets a cut instead. hold-black is the exception: a pause is pacing rather than motion, so their scene still holds for the beat you wrote, it just arrives and leaves on a hard cut with no ramps. A story cannot opt a reader back into motion by asking for a fancier transition.
Every transition is also suppressed when a cutaway is up: painting over a running clip is the flash between clips that the format exists to avoid. The music bed plays straight through all six.
Add an ambient bed
Ambient is a looping background sound for the scene: room tone, rain, a low hum. It is scene state, not a beat, so it starts on scene entry and needs no direction in the script. It has no authored volume of its own and rides the reader's sound-effects slider.
Pick the room it is heard in
Reverb on a scene you make today starts on Same as the set, and most scenes should stay there. A set can carry its own acoustics (open it in the asset inspector and pick its Acoustics), and every scene staged in it is then heard in that room without you choosing anything: pick the boiler room, get the boiler room's sound. A set with no acoustics of its own plays dry, which is how every scene sounded before any of this existed.
Choose a preset on the scene when this scene is the exception: a lounge dressed as a cellar, a hall used for one whispered corridor. That includes none, which is a real choice and not a blank. It plays a set that carries a room deliberately dry.
An older scene may not start there. Inheriting is newer than the field: for a short while a new scene was written with none already in it, because sets had no room to inherit yet. A stored none is an override like any other and the editor keeps it rather than guessing it away, so giving that scene's set an Acoustics changes nothing on its own. What the select shows is always what the scene does: open the scenes that should take the room, set Reverb back to Same as the set once each, and from then on the set decides. Scenes older than the Reverb field never stored one at all, so they follow the set already.
The acoustics of the place are one of five:
none: dry, no room at all.room: a small space with soft walls. An office, a bedroom, a cabin.hall: a big bright space with a long tail. A church, an atrium, a station.cellar: tight, dark and stony. A basement, a boiler room, a tunnel.outdoors: almost nothing, just a short slap off something distant.
Voices, dialogue blips, sound effects and the ambient bed all pick up the room. The music bed does not, because it is already mixed and a track with its own reverb would get the room twice. The room is per scene, and so is the sound in it: a looping effect that started in a none scene stays dry when the next scene has a room. The ambient bed is the exception. It carries across the boundary and joins the new room with everything else, so a rain loop that walks from a hallway into a boiler room sounds like the boiler room. A low-power device plays every scene dry, whatever you picked.
Move someone mid-scene
With a move stage direction. The header says where everyone starts; a move beat walks, jogs, runs or cuts a character to another mark, into the wings (offstage), or in from the wings if they were not placed at all. A character who has to walk in halfway through no longer needs a scene boundary. See Moving cast.
Everything else you can change mid-scene is a stage direction too: the shot (camera), which way someone faces (face), their expression, what they are doing (animation), props, light, weather, the sound, and full-screen media. All of them are on Stage directions.
What carries over, and what does not
The scene-entry op is the reset point. When a playthrough crosses into a scene:
| Thing | On scene entry |
|---|---|
| Placements, environment, opening camera, handheld, reverb | Replaced by the new scene's header, including any placement a move changed. A header that leaves reverb on Same as the set takes the new environment's acoustics |
A camera direction's override, its target, and any move it left the shot resting on | Cleared, so the new scene's preset takes over |
| Facings and looping idles | Cleared; everyone faces the camera again and stands in the default idle |
| Props, light preset, weather | Cleared. Place the lantern again, light the night again |
| Letterbox | Cleared, including on restart and on resuming a save |
| Ambient bed | Swapped only if the new scene names a different asset. Naming the same one keeps it playing without a restart |
| Music | Keeps playing. Stop it with a music stop direction if it should not follow you |
| A cutaway | Keeps playing. It survives beats and scene edges until a direction ends or replaces it |
That last row is the one that surprises people, and it is intentional: it is what lets a chain of video scenes play back to back without the stage flashing between clips.
Expressions are not cleared by scene entry either. If a character is placed in both scenes, the sad face you gave them stays sad. Set it back explicitly when a new scene should start on a fresh expression.
When it looks wrong
The set covers the floor with a black slab. Some environment packs ship their own large ground plane. The stage hides flat, wide meshes sitting at floor level so its own floor, fog, and contact shadows show through. If yours still lands on top, it is probably not flat enough to detect; try a different set.
A character is off the edge of the frame. Check who else is placed. Presets frame the cast they name, so a lone character at far-right gets a shot centered on them, but a two-shot with a partner four marks away has to pull back a long way to hold both.
An animation or expression does nothing. The stage waits for a placed character's model to finish downloading before running a direction at them, but it does not wait for anyone who is off-stage, so a direction aimed at an unplaced member can simply miss. Expressions also need a VRM avatar: below that tier there is nothing to drive.
Nothing is drawn at all. No environment and no placements is a legal scene, and it renders as an empty backdrop. It is fine for a narration-only scene, less fine as an accident.