Fountain, the source of truth

What Fountain is

Fountain is a plain-text screenplay format: you write the screenplay in ordinary text, and a few conventions (a line in capitals becomes a character name, an INT./EXT. line becomes a scene heading…) are enough to format it. It is an open format, readable as-is, that locks you into no software.

You do not need to know these conventions to write: the Screenplay mode offers an editor that formats everything for you. But it helps to know that, under the hood, your screenplay is Fountain.

Why it matters

In Open Cine Prod Tools, the screenplay text is the heart of the project. The other modes do not copy that text: they hook onto it.

• The shot list links each shot to the exact passages of the screenplay it covers.
• The breakdown tags passages of the screenplay to fill the resources catalogues.
• The schedule places shots, which point back to scenes.

The result: when the screenplay changes, the application knows what is affected and warns you (for example, a shot whose covered text has moved is flagged "needs checking"). It is also why everything starts from good foundations: a clean screenplay makes the rest of the work reliable.

A word on vocabulary

In the English interface, a scene is a screenplay scene, in the usual sense. In the French interface the same thing is called une séquence, because the word scène names something else in that trade — a naming rule that touches French alone. For the concrete formatting, see the Fountain cheat sheet.