Locking a draft

What a lock does

Locking a draft freezes two things that everybody downstream treats as addresses: scene numbers and page numbers. Once locked, scene 14 is scene 14 and page 42 is page 42, in the schedule, in the call sheet and in the note an actor wrote in a margin.

The colour order

A revision after a lock is issued as a coloured draft, in the standard order:

White → Blue → Pink → Yellow → Green → Goldenrod → Buff → Salmon → Cherry → Tan, then second white and round again.

ScriptLock issues the next colour for you and prints the colour and the date on every revised page.

A-pages

When a revision makes a page longer, the material that spills off the end does not push every later page down by one. It becomes page 42A. Page 43 stays where it was, so nobody's note moves.

The same convention applies to scenes: a scene inserted between 14 and 15 is 14A, and one appended after 15 is 16 — not 15A.

If the convention runs out of room — a page that would have to sort before the page in front of it — ScriptLock says so, naming the pages, rather than guessing. A production renumbers at the next lock.

OMITTED

A cut scene keeps its number and reads OMITTED. Renumbering would move everything after it.

Starred versus clean

Every revised line takes an asterisk in the right margin. Print a starred copy for the people who need to see what moved, and a clean copy for everybody else; both carry the same page numbers.

The authorship record

Every revision records a SHA-256 hash of its text, the time and who issued it, and you can download a certificate of it.

It proves that this exact text was in this account at that time and has not changed since. It is not a copyright registration and not a WGA registration — Your script, your copyright says what it is and is not, in detail. Do a registration as well, not instead.