Tentpole is a visual planning space for story — an infinite canvas backed by a real production data model. Unlike a generic whiteboard, a character isn't just a card you drew: it's a first-class entity that recurs across scenes, carries a photo, bio, and notes, and shows up wherever you place it. Your protagonist can thread through forty scenes; a documentary subject can recur across nine reels — Tentpole tracks both the same way.
You plan the way you think — spatially and visually — with structure underneath. Your story lays out as a grid: time runs left-to-right (grouped into acts), and the rows are the beats or scenes that make it up. Position carries meaning.
When you create a project you choose its type, which sets the working vocabulary and a set of starter card types:
Everything underneath is the same neutral model, so nothing is locked in — a screenwriter and a doc-maker are using the same tool with different labels, and you can rename or restyle any of it. Making online video? Either type works: pick Documentary for a VO-and-b-roll video essay, or Narrative for a scripted sketch or series — then map your segments to sequences and your talking points to beats.
Tentpole organizes a project into three nested levels:
Example (screenplay): Act I holds two sequences — “Ordinary World” and “Call to Adventure” — each a column of scene cards. Act II's four sequences carry the rising complications; Act III's two bring the climax and resolution.
Add things: use a column's footer to add a beat/scene, and the “+ Add reel/sequence” control (or a column/act menu) to add columns. The act band lets you rename, reorder, and add acts.
The Parking Lot at the bottom holds beats you haven't placed — a scene you know you need but haven't slotted, or an alternate version. Drag a beat out of the grid to park it, and back in when you know where it goes. Capture first, place later.
Click a card to select it and open the inspector (a side panel, or a bottom sheet on a phone):
M:SS; durations roll
up into per-sequence runtimes and a total (a useful gut-check that your Act II isn't bloated).Use Move to send a scene to another sequence or the Parking Lot, or reorder it within its sequence — restructuring a script is dragging cards, not cutting and pasting pages. Links you type in Notes/Visuals become clickable chips.
Every card has a category — your own types, each with a name, color, and shape, so the board reads at a glance. A screenwriter might use Scene, Dialogue-heavy, Action, Flashback, Montage, and Turning point; a doc-maker Interview, B-roll, Archival, and Narration. New projects come seeded with a starter set for your type — edit or add your own in the Library. (Changing a category's color or shape restyles every card of that type.)
Characters, locations, and references are first-class, reusable entities — attach the same character to every scene they appear in, give them a photo and a bio, and they stay consistent everywhere. Colour-code by character to see a protagonist's presence across the whole script, or spot where a subplot goes quiet.
Attach someone: in a scene's inspector choose “+ Attach”, pick a type (Character, Location, …), then an existing entity — or “New Character” to create one on the spot. Attachment order matters: a card can display the photo of its top-most attachment, so reorder to choose whose face fronts the scene.
The Library is where you manage everything: create and edit types (each with its own custom fields — a Character could have Age, Want, Need, Arc; a Location could have Interior/Exterior and Time of day), add/rename/delete entities, and set per-entity color and photos. Because types are user-defined, you can model a series bible, a novel's cast, or a doc's roster of subjects and archival sources.
A row of view controls tunes how the board reads:
Freeform (Mac/iPad app): a loose canvas for index-card-style brainstorming — scatter scenes, cluster a subplot, then “Clean Up” to snap everything back into the grid.
Draw arrows between cards to show flow, cause, an intercut, a visual rhyme, or a reference — perfect for wiring a setup to its payoff, tracking a motif, or marking an intercut sequence. Turn on Connect, click a source card, then a target; click a connector's label to change its type, relabel, or delete it.
Switch to Outline for a document view of the same project — Acts › Sequences › Beats as an indented list — fully editable in place. It's the writerly counterpart to the board: draft titles and notes as prose, reorder scenes, and click any card to open its inspector for the rest. Board when you're thinking in space; Outline when you're thinking in words.
Tentpole is built around structure. Each sequence can carry a function in your chosen framework — Tentpole's flagship is the 8-Point Story Arc (Stasis, Trigger, Quest, Surprise, Critical Choice, Climax, Reversal, Resolution) for scripted work, with a documentary argument spine for non-fiction. Sequences and acts can also carry target lengths, and Tentpole shows actual-vs-target pacing so you can catch a saggy middle before you're deep in pages. When you create a project you can start from a preset for a target runtime.
Share a project to invite a collaborator by email — a co-writer, a producer, an editor — and everyone edits the same project with changes in sync.
Comments keep notes out of the work itself. Comment on a scene (or a specific field via its 💬 bubble), @mention a collaborator, and reply or resolve threads — table reads and producer notes without a pile of tracked changes. The inbox gathers open threads and mentions of you; unread comments show in red.
Generate from research (Mac/iPad app): feed Tentpole your notes, a treatment, a PDF, or images and it drafts a starting structure — acts, sequences, beats, and the characters/locations it finds — which you then refine. AI usage is metered and capped.
Exports (Mac/iPad app): a text outline, a full-board image, a story-structure
JSON, and a two-column A/V script (including a Word .docx) with
on-screen visuals on the left and voiceover/audio on the right — the exact format video essayists
and YouTubers script in. (Screenwriting-native exports like Fountain are on the roadmap — tell us
what you'd use at support@artifact.video.)
Sign in with the same account on every platform. To reset a password, use “Forgot password?” on the sign-in screen. You can delete individual projects, or your whole account and its data — see Account & data deletion. We don't sell your data or train AI models on your content; see our Privacy Policy.