It's not easy being consistent.
Before publishing a script, and especially if a character is using character reports, it's crucial to ensure that a character has been referred to consistently throughout a script (most importantly in dialog elements).
Inadvertent Pain Points
You're a human being (unless you're the newest member of the WGA, ChatGPT3.5, print("Greetings! Hire me!")). And though you might not realize it, there are certain ingrained rules you've internalized and developed without realizing it and that come out in your writing. One of these, for example, is the order of adjectives - a rule to never bring up with your writers unless you want to immediately be cut from the running for a freelance episode you'll never get. Another, and this is key to the topic at hand, is to employ variety when communicating if you don't want to sound like Ralph Wiggum. Usually this isn't a problem. You just saunter, walk, mosey, meander, ramble, or traipse down to the reference section at LA County's most beautiful library and bust out a thesaurus.
Characters, however, invite a different issue.
Serena Lin and Dr. Lin and Doctor Lin and Serena and Serean and...
In your attempt to keep from boring the reader, you may have dared to refer to your characters in different ways. Or even worse, you may have mistyped that character's name when while rushing to recreate that pithy back-and-forth you were inspired to create after binging six episodes of The West Wing.
This will be your undoing. Final Draft (and Casting) can't differentiate between which characters are unique and which are repeats of already-established-characters. To find where you (or more likely, your staff writer) went wrong, run a Cast Report (Tools > Reports > Cast Report). You'll get something like this:
And it'll happen to you, too.
In a perfect world, your character's name (and the derivations you used) would be unique enough that a quick Find + Replace would handle the job. But in the case above, "Lasy Sasha" shows up 119 times, and "Sasha" shows up once. That means you'll need to cycle through at least 120 names (not including those in action or scene headings) to find the lone, problematic "Sasha".
There are other tools at your disposal to handle this issue.
Character Reports
If you haven't had to publish character reports, you will. They always get you sooner or later.
Character reports are like sides, except that they consolidate all of a character's dialog (and only that character's dialog) into one report. This is handy when you have an actor working with a dialect coach, for example.
What is extremely important for us, my dear script coordinator, is that character reports also lay out the pages where a piece of dialog occurs.
To open a character report, go to Tools > Reports > Character Report, then choose one of the wrong characters you need to fix.
You'll find the page number of the offending scene in the report. It's up to you to find and track down the offending culprit.
And in case you find yourself tripping on creating a Character Report vs a Cast Report (and vice versa), just remember that a Character Report if for a single character, while the Cast Report reports on (you guess it!) the whole cast.
Ghosts in the Report
If you've been scouring the site looking for a tricky bit of insider baseball you can use in your negotiations (not that a UPM or studio coordinator will care or offer you above scale), boy oh boy, am I happy you made it this far.
In the Cast Report above, you may have noticed a ghost. A character with 0 speaking lines that doesn't exist anywhere in the script but mysteriously still shows up in the cast report.
Before Final Draft 9, Cast Reports were generated by taking the names in the SmartType Database and compiling them into a report. But when FD9 came out, reports became generated by compiling information in the Scene Navigator. (Oddly enough, Locations and other reports are still compiled from SmartType, so rebuilding your SmartType Database should resolve any ghost locations).
The truth is that the script coordinator is the only person handling the .fdx and using it to create reports. So no one will care about this but you. But SCs are cut from a different cloth, and we know how these inconsistencies will gnaw away at us. So if you want to solve it:
The Official Way
Open a character report for the ghost to find the scene they're located in:
Navigate to that scene in your script in the Scene Navigator (Navigator > Scenes). Find the offending scene, then scroll down to "Characters In Scene", find the character with a red X by their name, then hit the minus button to remove them.
If you have multiple characters with red X's, or you need to remove this character from multiple scenes, you have to keep clicking the - button. Once they're completely removed from the scene navigator, they'll stop showing up in your Cast Reports.
The Unofficial Way
We're no strangers to jumping into Final Draft's code, but this is a little trickier than usual. If you search for the offending character's name, you may find it a few times under sections like "SmartType" and "Cast". You can delete these from the code with no problem, but the name will still show up in the report — if you're going the code route, you should delete these to be thorough.
But the truly offending code is a piece of metadata called a CharacterArcBeat.
You will need to be sure to delete the entire CharacterArcBeat (starting with CharacterArcBeat and ending with /CharacterArcBeat). Save the file, open it back up in Final Draft, and voila! No more ghosts.
Why This Happens
What you see on the page when you type in Final Draft is only a fraction of the data FD is keeping track of in your script. This is why you can mark a character as a non-speaking character in your action lines, and FD will add them to your Cast Report.
When you add a speaking character to a script, their name is added to the Cast and SmartType lists, but they also get data attributed to them - in this case, this piece of metadata called the CharacterArcBeat. This is part of a feature set Final Draft offers to keep track of character notes, motivations, etc. The problem is that, when you delete a character from the scene by erasing them, their dialogue, and their mentions, that doesn't completely erase them from FD's Character Arc navigator. Because the remnant is there, it gets called on by the Cast Report, leaving you with ghosts.
Warnings for Script Coordinators
Though it might seem like overkill, you should run the Cast Report every time before you publish. It's one of the fastest ways to identify whether a character's name has been misspelled. In the midst of a heavy round of rewrites, it can also identify if a character has inadvertently been written out of the show (if a character doesn't have any speaking lines, do they even really exist)? Flagging this for your showrunner before it makes it to casting can save a deluge of headaches later on.
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