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, and you can switch frameworks from the header: the 8-Point Story Arc, Save the Cat!, the Hero's Journey, Three-Act, Dan Harmon's Story Circle, a Video Essay retention structure for online video, or the documentary argument spine for non-fiction. (Switching remaps your reels' functions by name where it can.) 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.
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 Fountain screenplay that imports into
Final Draft, Highland, WriterDuet, and every other screenwriting tool; 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; plus a
text outline, a full-board image, and a story-structure JSON. Tentpole plans the shape of your
story, then hands it off to whatever you write and edit in.
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.