Docs › Screenwriting › Series → Season → Episode → Scene: the four levels inside an old project

Series → Season → Episode → Scene: the four levels inside an old project

Last updated September 9, 2026 · 5 min read

In one line: every scene in an old project hangs off a four-level tree. 4.0 has no such tree, which is why things land somewhere different once you copy a project across.

Seasons & Episodes at the foot of the Script Studio Planning tab: season card S1 expanded to show logline, theme, synopsis and season storylines, with EP01 nested underneath — This is where the tree is edited: Plan view → Planning tab → scroll down to Seasons & Episodes.

What the tree looks like

Series
  Season 1
    EP01
      Scene 1
      Scene 2
    EP02
  Season 2

A season is a collapsible card with its episodes stacked inside it. Scenes are not on this page — those live on the scene board.

Each level is its own record with its own fields:

Level	What it holds
Series	Title, author, type, logline, concept, target audience, synopsis
Season	Name, logline, theme, synopsis, season storylines
Episode	Name, subtitle, logline, episode theme, scene count, writing status
Scene	Interior/exterior, location, time, summary, characters, episode storylines, conflict level, structural beat

Storylines exist at two levels, which is easy to miss: season storylines are created on the season card, and only episode storylines can be tagged onto an individual scene.

A film is four levels too

Write a feature and the tree is still four levels deep, with one season and one episode in it. You do not need to treat them as folders, and there is no tidier arrangement to switch to. Those two levels exist so that the scene board, the characters and the storylines all have one shared index to hang from.

4.0 has no such tree

The old Script Studio

Four fixed levels, the same in every project
A scene always belongs to an episode
The hierarchy is edited in the Planning tab

The Writing Studio in 4.0

Files and folders, nested however you like
An episode is one .script file; a scene is a stretch of it that starts with a scene heading
The shape of the whole thing sits on a .beats board

The reason for dropping it is that the old tree decided a hierarchy on everyone's behalf. Writing a single feature meant working around two empty levels; writing loose short pieces meant they never fitted at all. 4.0 hands the arrangement back to you, and the price is that nothing now enforces "a scene must belong to an episode".

One other difference: in 4.0 the AI can edit the fields in those structure files directly. On the old side the AI is switched off, so all four levels are hand-worked.

Where each level lands after a copy

Press Copy as new Writing Studio book and the four levels flatten into files:

This level in the old project	Becomes
Series	The book itself, plus one Series Bible `.md`
Season	A folder — generated only if you named the season or had more than one — with a Season Bible `.md` inside
Episode	One `.script` file, named after the episode
Scene	A stretch of that `.script` file, starting at its scene heading
The shape of the whole thing	One `.beats` board called Story Skeleton

If there was a single unnamed season, no empty "Season 1" folder is invented; the screenplay files go straight into a Screenplay folder.

Season 1/
  EP01.script
  Season Bible.md
Characters/
  J. Doe.md
Locations/
  Lighthouse Cottage.md
Storylines/
  A-story.md
Series Bible.md
Story Skeleton.beats

The two tiers of storyline stop being tiers in the new book. Season and episode storylines both arrive as .md files in the Storylines folder.

The ⋯ menu on an old screenplay — where the copy lives
The Plan view and its six tabs
The scene board
The file tree — what structure looks like in 4.0
The beat board

Try it in Slima

Open the app and do this with your own book. Free to start, no credit card.

Open Slima

Was this helpful?