Screenplay step-outline - Can you show a runtime for scenes?

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

I’m using Scrivener to develop a step-outline for a film screenplay.

I want to assign each scene an approximate runtime, just so I can get a rough idea of the total film runtime during development.

Does anyone know of a way to do this and display the total for all scenes listed in the folder?

Thanks,
Keith

2

You can easily create a custom metadata field to hold the runtime specification, and this can be added as a column in outline view, but you won’t get automatic subtotals for folders. (Presumably this is because there is no dedicated numeric metadata field type – so there is no built-in function to ask for subtotalling at the container level.)

-gr

Ps. But if these runtime numbers are just intended runtimes (i.e. are not actually derived from your script’s page length using the minute-per-page rule), then I guess I wonder that you don’t have a going-in idea of the intended runtime of your foldered segments in the first place. In which case you could just assign them manually too.

3

Thanks for your feedback, I’ll explore the metadata idea.

4

If you can’t get it sorted out to your satisfaction, here’s a simpler solution.

I know that I tend to write scenes that are 2-3 pages long. (A few may be 1 page, but mostly, 2-3 pages.) So I limit myself to 48 scenes in my first draft, which makes my draft fall between 96-120 pages.

HTH