AI Screenwriting: From Idea to Screenplay (or Import Yours)

Give the project a title and pick a format. Feature film is the standard mode: one continuous story made of acts and sequences. Episodical / TV adds an episode layer above the acts, for a series or an anthology. For a single short sequence like SIGNAL, feature film is right.

Under the title sits the hierarchy ScreenWeaver thinks in. A useful way to read it:

• A scene is a place and a time.
• A story beat is a thing that changes.
• A sequence is a run of scenes that belong together.
• An act is a movement of the film.

You do not have to use every layer. A one-minute short needs one of each, and the extra layers sit there quietly. On a feature or a series they are the difference between a script you can navigate and 110 pages you have to scroll. If in doubt, start with scenes and add layers when the project needs them.

The most common mistake is writing scenes immediately, then discovering an hour later that the story does not want to be that shape. So the lesson starts in the AI Center: on the left, every AI job the project has run and what it cost; on the right, an assistant that has read your project. It is not a general chatbot in a side panel.

Notice what is in it: the length, the constraints, and a request for three directions instead of the answer. Ask for the answer and you get the most obvious version of your own idea handed back. Ask for three and you get to choose, which is where your taste enters the project. Of the three that came back (a ghost story, a time-travel puzzle, a story about grief), the third won, not because the AI recommended it but because it had a real ending and needed the fewest things built.

That prompt carries a creative request (a visual reveal) and a production request (one room, no second character) at the same time. In this workspace they are not separate concerns. A story with 14 locations and six speaking parts can be beautiful, and it is miserable to generate. Deciding early saves real money later.

Asking for a one-scene, one-minute draft in standard screenplay format gives you formatted scene headings, action and dialogue. Then comes the most important habit of the lesson: read it as a proposal, not a result. Some of it will be right. Some of it will be someone else's instinct wearing your idea's clothes.

Propose, read, reject, redirect. The assistant is fast and not precious, so use that. It runs in two modes: Thinking is slower and reasons more, good for structure and analysis; Flash is quicker and cheaper, good for small mechanical jobs.

The toolbar sets what each line is: scene heading, action, character, dialogue, parenthetical, transition, plus the structural elements (episode, act, sequence, beat). The Tab key moves between elements so you can write a page without touching the toolbar, and an icon toggles the outline while you write. There is also a shot element, unusual in a screenwriting tool, so shots can live in your script and not only in your storyboard.

There is no import button. Importing goes through the assistant: attach your file to a conversation and ask it to import the script. It accepts PDF screenplays, Final Draft .fdx files, WriterDuet JSON and plain text. It works this way because importing is a reading job, not a file conversion: something has to decide what is a slugline, what is action, who is speaking and where scenes break.

The more your source looks like a screenplay, the less interpretation happens. A well formatted PDF or FDX imports almost perfectly. A treatment imports as material, so ask for structure explicitly:

Then check three things, every time:

1. 1Scene count. Do the scene cards match the sluglines in your script? Six scenes in, four cards out means two were merged, and every shot generated from them inherits the mistake.
2. 2Characters. Every speaking part should be there. A missing name was probably formatted as action in the source.
3. 3Dialogue. Open two or three scenes and read them. Dialogue absorbed into an action paragraph is the most common import problem, and far cheaper to fix now than after storyboarding.

Run it the day you import. Writers are regularly surprised: 14 locations where they thought there were eight, or a character with two lines they had been treating as a lead. If the count is bad news for production, ask it to reduce the number of locations without reducing the emotional impact, and to tell you what you lose in each case. That last clause stops the exercise turning into vandalism.

• Aspect ratio: 16:9, 9:16, 2.39:1, 2:1 or 4:3. It applies to newly created shots only and does not change frames you already generated, so set it now. SIGNAL uses 2.39:1 for a cinematic, claustrophobic frame.
• Collaboration: invite someone by email with a role, and they work inside the same project, not on a PDF of it.
• Duplicate the project before any big structural rewrite, so the version you liked still exists.
• Export a Screenwriter backup (next to PDF and Final Draft) now, and again before every major change.

Which road should you take? If you have a script, import it rather than retyping it to feel fresh. If you have an idea, build it here rather than drafting elsewhere first, because your characters, places and shots are assembled while you write. Either way you arrive at the same screen, where Lesson 3 begins.