Characters Overview

A Character in CSF is a named person in your project — with a description, portrait, scene appearances, and page-eighth stats. Characters are created automatically when you import a script, or you can add them by hand.

What Is a Character?

Each character record stores a name, an optional description (physical appearance, personality notes), an optional actor assignment, and computed stats like scene count and page eighths. Characters can also have one or more AI-generated or uploaded portraits.

Two Ways to Create Characters

Characters appear in your project through two paths:

Auto-parsed from Script Import

When you import a Fountain screenplay, the parser detects every character name in dialogue blocks and creates a character record automatically.

Manual “Add Character”

Use the + Add Character button at the top of the Characters tab to create a character from scratch with a name and optional description.

How Characters Connect to Everything

Characters sit at the center of your project data and flow into several downstream systems:

1 Script — The Fountain screenplay you import

2 Characters + Scenes — Parsed from dialogue and scene headings, linked via SceneCharacter

3 Wardrobes — Auto-created for each character to manage costume designs per scene

4 Design Portraits — AI-generated images used in storyboard panels

5 Storyboards — Visual panels that reference character portraits and descriptions

Characters vs Sides

If your project contains Sides (audition scripts), the characters extracted from those are the same character records. A character generated from a Sides import can later appear in a full screenplay import and the records will be matched and merged — no duplicates.

The Characters Tab

The Characters tab in your project dashboard is where you manage your entire cast. From here you can add, edit, describe, generate portraits, and perform bulk operations on any number of characters.