4.0 Screenwriting now lives in the Writing Studio

A screenplay is a file, not an app.

One episode per file, sitting in the same tree as the series bible, the beat board and the world map. Scene cards, cast pulled from the dialogue, runtime as you type, and both local and Hollywood layout on the way out.

Start writing free See the scene board
app.slima.ai · Writing Studio
🎬 The Last Night Train S1 · 8 eps
▾📂 Season One8
🎬S1E01 The Departure.script
🎬S1E02 The Signal.script
🎬S1E03 Last Stop.script
▾📂 Series bible
🗂️Season arc.beats
🕸️Who knows whom.map
🗓️Story timeline.timeline
+ New scene
Scene 14 · Harbour Pub · Night✓ SavedHollywood

INT. HARBOUR PUB — NIGHT

Rain against the window. MARIA counts the till twice and gets a different number both times. The door does not open, which is the problem.

MARIA

You said the last train was at eleven.

HALBERG (O.S.)

I said there was a last train.

✓ Saved14 scenes · 9 INT / 5 EXT44 min / 48 min
Writing Coach
HAS READ ALL 8 EPISODES
Does episode 2 land the reveal too early?
Scene 14 gives away the signal before Maria has a reason to care about it. Episode 1 set her up as someone who does not ask questions — let her ask one first.↳ reading S1E01–S1E03
Maria, arc across the seasonScene order
Cast detected
Maria · Halberg · Sung
🗂️ Beat board
Act II · 6 beats · 3 written
📤 Export
PDF · Word · Fountain · ePub
⏱ Runtime
44 min of a 48 min target
For people writing series, features and short-form drama
TV writersFeature writersShort-form dramaWriters' rooms
What changed

Script Studio became a file type.

Screenwriting used to be a separate room in Slima, with its own bookshelf and its own rules. It is now a `.script` file in the Writing Studio, which sounds like a technicality and is actually the whole point: the episode, the beat board it came from and the map of the city it happens in are finally siblings in one tree.

📁

One episode, one file

No season.json, no episode wrapper, no two-level bookkeeping. The file describes itself — format, episode number, target runtime, acts, scenes.

🗂️

The bible sits next to it

Characters, locations and world notes are ordinary files in the same project. So is the beat board, and so is the world map.

🔀

Everything else came along

Version history, whole-book search, comments, reading mode, export and the AI Coach all work on screenplays because they work on the project.

Scene board

The whole episode as a stack of cards.

Switch the tab from writing to board and the episode becomes a list you can reorder by dragging. Summary, location, time of day and cast are all editable right on the card, and each one shows how many minutes it is actually running.

  • Drag by the handle to reorder; arrows are still there for keyboard and touch
  • Two densities — full cards while you plan, compact when you just want the shape
  • The card never opens the editor by accident. Use the pen to jump to the scene.
The Signal · scene board
S1E02 · 14 scenes
12 INT Station office ~3 min
Halberg finds the timetable has been changed and says nothing about it.
Halberg Sung
13 EXT Platform 2 ~2 min
Maria waits for a train that is on the board and not on the track.
Maria Stationmaster
14 INT Harbour pub ~4 min
The count comes out wrong twice. Maria decides the second number is the true one.
Maria Halberg
Two formats

Local layout or Hollywood.

The same scene, printed two ways. The format is a property of the file, so you set it once and every export, every preview and the read-aloud all agree with each other.

Local format

Numbered slugs, full-width punctuation, △ before action
14. INT.　Harbour Pub　Night

△ Rain against the window. MARIA counts
  the till twice.

MARIA：You said the last train was at eleven.

▲（quietly）

HALBERG（O.S.）：I said there was a last train.

Hollywood format

Slug lines, centred cue and dialogue, Courier
INT. HARBOUR PUB - NIGHT

Rain against the window. MARIA counts the
till twice.

            MARIA
    You said the last train was at eleven.

            HALBERG (O.S.)
        (quietly)
    I said there was a last train.
PDFWord (.docx)FountainePubMarkdown

PDF fonts are fetched only when the content needs them, so a script with Japanese, Korean or Arabic in it comes out without a single missing glyph. Export a whole season and you get one merged PDF with a cover, or a zip with one Word file per episode.

Counted for you

Numbers a writers' room actually asks for.

Not a dashboard. Four things you would otherwise be working out by hand at eleven at night.

👥

Cast, from the dialogue

Who speaks in a scene is read off the scene itself, so it updates when the dialogue does. Add someone who is present but silent and that addition sticks — it never goes stale when you rewrite the lines.

⏱

Runtime as you type

Dialogue and action are counted at different rates, plus a fixed allowance per scene transition. The title bar shows the running total against your target and goes amber near it, red over it.

📐

The shape of the episode

Scene count, interior-to-exterior ratio, how many speaking parts. Enough to notice that act two is nine interiors in a row before a producer does.

🔊

Hear it read back

Give each character their own voice and let the scene play. Slug lines and action go to the narrator. It runs on the voices already in your operating system, so it costs nothing.

The rest of the project

A series is more than its episodes.

The same file types the novelists use turn out to be exactly what a series bible is made of.

🗂️

Beat board for the season

Acts as columns, beats as cards, and a card can hold the episode file it becomes. Expand a screenplay card and its scenes list out underneath with their runtimes.

🕸️

Relationship board

Who knows whom, who is lying, which faction each of them answers to. Directed lines with labels, groups that move together, and it works on a phone.

🗓️

Timeline with swimlanes

Put the scenes on an axis and give each character a lane. When someone drops out for four episodes, the gap is visible instead of remembered.

See all six file types

AI on scenes

Ask for a scene, get a scene.

The AI addresses screenplays scene by scene and element by element. A new scene arrives as a dashed card in the position it belongs, changes are marked on the line they change, and you accept or skip them one at a time — on the page, not in a JSON blob in the chat panel.

  • Add, move or rewrite a scene heading, a line of action, a cue, a piece of dialogue
  • It never rewrites the whole file, so the dialogue you like is still the dialogue you wrote
You · S1E02
Add a short exterior between 13 and 14 where Maria sees the timetable board change.
Slima Coach
Added scene 14, EXT. STATION FORECOURT — NIGHT, between the platform and the pub. It is one action line and no dialogue, so it reads as a beat rather than a scene. Everything after it renumbered.
1 change waiting · accept or skip
If you were already using Script Studio

Your existing screenplays are safe, and there is a converter

Script Studio is winding down rather than switching off. Projects already in there stay open and stay writable — we are not going to leave you halfway through a season. What it no longer does is start new work: the “new project” buttons now point at the Writing Studio.

Each project's ⋯ menu has “Copy as a new Writing Studio book”. It turns every episode into a `.script` file, rebuilds the season structure as a beat board, converts characters, locations and storylines into ordinary notes, and relinks paired foreshadowing notes so the setups still point at their payoffs. Media comes across too.

It is a copy, not a move. The original stays exactly where it is, and later edits on either side do not sync to the other. If a conversion goes wrong, write to service@slima.ai and we will look at it with you.

Questions

Before you start.

Which screenplay formats does Slima support? +
Two: a local numbered-slug layout and standard Hollywood. Each file carries its own setting, so a project can hold both. There is no third national standard in here yet — if you need one, tell us which and why.
Can I get my script into Final Draft? +
Export to Fountain, which Final Draft, Highland, Slugline and most other screenwriting tools import directly. Word and PDF are there for the people who only want to read it.
Does the AI write dialogue for me? +
It can, and it is not what the tool is for. The scene-level tools exist so it can restructure — add a scene, move a beat, tighten a heading — while you keep the lines. Anything it does write arrives as a suggestion you accept or skip.
Is there a page count? +
There is a runtime estimate rather than a page count, because page-per-minute breaks down the moment a script is not in Courier on US Letter. Dialogue and action are counted at separate rates and each scene gets a transition allowance.
Can two of us work on the same season? +
Team plans put a season in a shared workspace with roles, chapter review and an audit trail. It is in closed beta right now — the Team page has the details and the form.

Write one scene and see.

Open a book, add a screenplay file, and put a slug line in it. That is the whole test.

Start writing free See the Writing Studio