Scene heading: interior/exterior, location, time

In one line: how to set interior/exterior, location and time on a .script scene heading — and how to keep location names consistent now that the locations list is gone.

Where the scene heading lives now

A screenplay is a .script file in the Writing Studio's file tree, one episode per file (right-click a folder, choose New Script). Open an episode and every scene carries a narrow row above it: that row is the scene heading. It isn't a line you type into the script body — it's a handful of fields on the scene. Change a field and the typeset slugline changes with it.

Left to right:

Control	What it does
Arrow	Collapses the scene, leaving the heading row
Number	Scene number — computed, never typed
INT / EXT	Click to toggle
Location	Type straight in; there's an autocomplete
~2m	Estimated running time (read-only)
Target minutes	Edit in place; clear it to unset
DAY / NIGHT / DAWN / DUSK	Click to cycle
(+)	Annotation — free text in parentheses
×	Delete this scene

Locations are no longer a list

The 3.x Script Studio had a Locations tab: create a location entity first, then attach it to a scene from a dropdown. 4.0 has no such tab and no location files — a location is the text in that field on the heading.

Typing is the whole job, which is faster; the cost is that consistency is now yours to keep. Two things help.

The autocomplete. Focus the location field or start typing and a dropdown appears, drawn from every location name used in a scene heading anywhere in this book's .script files, most-used first. Each row shows the scene count on the right, and a small tag on the left recording whether it was interior or exterior the last time it appeared. Pick one and the name matches the earlier scenes exactly.

The same-named file link. If a location name matches the name (or an alias) of a .md file in this book, a dashed underline appears under it and Ctrl/Cmd + click opens that file. So if you want notes on a place, keep a You'an Scriptorium.md in your planning folder and the two join up by themselves — but it's optional, and nothing stops you writing without it.

Type a name you haven't used before and the last row of the dropdown offers Create new location "Salt Bridge Night Market". All it does is write that name into this scene's heading. No file is created; the name simply turns up in the list next time the roster is rebuilt.

What it prints as

The same scene, in each format:

Ink Tide (Screenplay), Episode 01, scene 1

Hollywood
INT. YOU'AN SCRIPTORIUM - DUSK (the shopfront) Taiwan
1. 內景　You'an Scriptorium　昏（the shopfront）

Same content; only the printed marks differ.

Hollywood prints the industry words — INT., EXT., DAY — and the Taiwan format prints the Taiwanese ones, in Chinese. Neither follows your interface language: the format decides the printed marks, and your language shows up in the editor's own buttons. See Format switch.

Interior or exterior

• Inside a room, a car, a ship's hold → INT
• A street, a quay, a rock shelf → EXT
• Shooting from indoors out through a doorway: there is no third option. This is a toggle. Pick where the camera mainly sits and put the rest in the annotation.

This isn't just a label. Interiors need a build or a borrowed room; exteriors need a recce, a weather call and a light budget — a crew plans its prep off this field, so put down the one that's true. The status bar at the foot of the editor keeps a running INT/EXT split for the episode.

Time and annotation

The time button cycles four values only: DAY → NIGHT → DAWN → DUSK → DAY.

LATER and CONTINUOUS are not in that cycle — they're annotations. Click (+), type, and the text prints in parentheses after the time. Flashbacks, dreams and montages use the same field; see Flashback and special scenes. "The shopfront" in the example above is an annotation too: for a different corner of the same place, an annotation is cleaner than a second location name.

Editing a heading on a phone

On a phone a .script opens as the typeset page. Tap a scene heading and a sheet rises from the bottom: two buttons for interior/exterior, a location field, four time buttons, Insert Scene Below, and a delete that asks first. Annotations are desktop-only. Tapping a line in the body edits that line instead — see Enter and Tab: the element flow.

Related

• Docs: The script element types
• Docs: Enter and Tab: the element flow
• Docs: Format switch: Taiwan and Hollywood
• Docs: Flashback and special scenes
• Docs: Split and merge scenes