Script Import (Fountain)

The CMS can turn a screenplay into a graphic novel skeleton. Upload a script in the open Fountain format and the import wizard walks you from raw text to a ready-to-illustrate work:

1. The script is parsed (scenes, dialogue, characters — with exact line numbers).
2. AI suggests a chapter → panel → speech-bubble structure with an art brief per panel.
3. You review and reorganize everything in a tree editor.
4. AI lays the panels out as pages for every output format you target.
5. You fine-tune the layouts in a drag & drop preview.
6. The work is created and opens in the editor.

The result is a complete, navigable work — titled panels and pages, styled and prepositioned speech bubbles with their speakers assigned, page layouts, characters, and a linear reading graph. The work is restricted to the output formats you selected, so the editor's format pickers only offer what you actually target. No artwork yet, by design: you add images or video behind the bubbles in the editor afterwards.

What the AI will never change

The import treats your script as untouchable source material:

• Dialogue is imported verbatim. The AI may organize lines into panels, but rewritten, merged, or invented dialogue is detected and replaced with the exact script text.
• No line is dropped. Every dialogue line ends up in exactly one (or more, if deliberately repeated) speech bubble; anything the AI omits is recovered automatically and flagged.
• Speakers stay correct. A bubble's character is always the speaker from the script, never the AI's guess.
• Full provenance. Every bubble remembers its source line — click the line badge in the review step to see the original script passage.

Running an import

Imports are resumable — leave the wizard at any point and continue later from the Open imports list on the upload step.

Follow my script

Some scripts are already broken down for comics: every scene heading is one panel, and # Sections mark the chapters. For those, pick Follow my script in the upload step instead of the AI suggestion:

• One panel per scene heading — nothing is split or merged, however many lines a scene has.
• A new chapter at every # Section, titled after the section (# SHIFT 1: INTAKE → Shift 1: Intake). There is no chapter size limit.
• An ID at the end of a heading leads the panel title: INT. ER WAITING ROOM - NIGHT (P017) becomes P017 · Teo sits very still…, so your panel numbering survives into the editor.
• Every dialogue line and !SUPER: caption becomes a balloon in script order; [[notes]] are kept in the panel description.
• No AI call is made for the structure, so the wizard's second step reads Structure instead of AI structure. The review, format, and layout steps work as usual.

The structure review in detail

The tree editor (step 4) is where you shape the book:

• Chapters pane — rename, reorder (drag), add or delete chapters. Deleting a chapter moves its panels to the previous one; nothing is lost.
• Panels & bubbles tree — drag bubbles between panels, reorder panels, and use the row actions: add bubble, duplicate panel, split panel at any bubble, merge with next, delete. + Panel inserts right after the selected panel (or the selected bubble's panel). Silent panels (no bubbles) are valid — great for establishing shots.
• Automatic renumbering — panel and bubble ids always follow reading order: reorder, insert, split, or delete anything and ch1-p001, ch1-p002, … renumber immediately.
• Inspector — edit the selected panel's art brief (the drawing instruction handed to your artist), camera hint, and mood, or move it to another chapter; for a bubble, edit its kind (speech, thought, shout, whisper, caption, narration, SFX), speaker, and text, or use Move to panel to send it to any panel — including collapsed ones and panels in other chapters, which drag & drop can't reach.
• Cast panel — rename display names and merge duplicate cues (e.g. THE KING and KING) — all bubbles are re-attributed.
• Undo/redo — Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y, and every change autosaves to the import session.

What the Fountain parser understands

Standard Fountain screenplay elements are recognized: the title page, scene headings (INT./EXT., including (FLASHBACK) and (CONTINUOUS) markers), action, character cues with extensions ((V.O.), (O.S.), (CONT'D)), parentheticals, dual dialogue, transitions (CUT TO:, > FADE OUT.), centered text, forced elements (!SUPER: becomes a caption), sections, synopses, notes, and boneyard comments.

Cues map to bubble kinds automatically — (whispering) becomes a whisper bubble, V.O. becomes narration, ALL-CAPS lines become shouts — and you can change any of it in the review step.

Limits and quotas

Script imports are metered per plan. When the monthly allowance is reached, the wizard tells you how much was used and which plan raises the limit. Completed imports count; retrying a failed step inside a session does not count as a new import.

After the import

The created work is a normal PanelWave work:

• Add artwork — panels have no image or video layers yet. Every panel is titled after its art brief and every page carries its AI-generated title, so the structure tree stays readable; the full art brief (from the script's action lines) is in the panel description. Add layers behind the bubbles.
• Position the bubbles — bubbles arrive styled by kind (speech, thought, shout, …), with their speaker already assigned to the matching character, and prepositioned (captions on top, dialogue stacked in reading order, alternating sides per speaker) as a readable starting point — not a final lettering pass. Refine them with the speech bubble tools.
• Add branching — the import creates a linear reading graph; add choices and conditions in the graph editor.
• Localize — all text is keyed under the locale you chose at upload; add languages in the Localization Workshop.

Common errors