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Setups and payoffs (Chekhov flags)

Flag the locket, and the Film Audit tells you if it is planted, stays visible, and pays off.

Open it →

Studio → a project → Clues.

The Prop Bible already keeps the locket looking like the same locket. This tracks whether it matters.

Those are different failures. A clue can be rendered perfectly in every one of its eleven shots and still be a dead plot thread — and no amount of looking at pixels will tell you.

### What gets caught

  • Orphaned setup — planted in scene 3 and never seen again. Every frame of it is correct. The audience still noticed.
  • Unplanted payoff — the scar identifies the twin in scene 41, but was never established. It reads as a cheat rather than a reveal.
  • A gap — planted and paid off, but missing from the scenes in between where the story needs it present.
  • On the plan but not on the screen — marked as set up in scene 3, but it does not appear in any shot there.

### Flagging one

Give it a name, the scenes where it is planted and paid off, and optionally the scenes where it must stay visible. Weight it: colour, supporting, or load-bearing. A load-bearing clue that does not pay off is a red audit flag.

Link it to a Bible entry where you can. A linked prop is checked against the actual shot links, which is far more reliable than searching prose. For a spoken clue, make the name the exact phrase — that is what is searched for.

### Suggestions

The page suggests candidates from what is already in the project. A prop appearing in exactly one scene is the classic orphaned setup: you put it there for a reason and the reason never arrived.

### On scene numbers

Clues reference scene ORDER rather than scene id, because scene rows are re-created every time the script is re-parsed and ids would dangle silently. Inserting a scene can shift a clue by one — the audit reports scene numbers that no longer exist rather than ignoring them.

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