# Projects and scenes

A project is the top-level container for a piece of work. A scene is a 3D space inside the project. A shot is a camera framing of that space at a moment in time. Three nouns, three different jobs.

## Why it exists

Real productions have all three concepts already. A commercial is a project. The kitchen interior and the parking-lot exterior are scenes. The over-the-shoulder reaction and the wide establishing are shots. The nesting is what lets a director say "let's reuse the parking-lot scene from the last spot" without it meaning the same camera angles.

Intangible mirrors that nesting. The thing that catches a new user is that **scenes** in Intangible are spatial – they're sets, locations, environments – not narrative beats. If you're coming from Premiere or Final Cut, the word "scene" carries a different meaning; here it's closer to "set" or "location" in the production-design sense.

## What it looks like in the product

The project is what you create from the homepage with the **New Project** button. Inside a project, the scenes dropdown sits at the top-left under the project title – click it to switch between scenes or to create a new one.

![Scene dropdown expanded under the Interior Staging project, showing the project's two scenes (Penthouse Interior, Penthouse Balcony) in the dropdown list](/files/d07Xb5js6M52RGHuBrOr)

A scene is a 3D environment with its own assets, populators, environment settings, and lighting. Switching scenes switches the entire 3D viewport content. A project can hold as many scenes as the work needs – think of a commercial spot with three locations as three scenes.

A shot belongs to a scene. Shots are added in Compose mode (see [Shots](/compose/shots.md)) and they live in the bottom-of-screen storyboard. Each shot has its own camera, its own lens, its own animation timeline.

## How it connects to the rest

* **Projects** are what get shared. The email-share flow ([Sharing and collaboration](/overview/reference/sharing-and-collaboration.md)) shares the whole project, not a scene.
* **Scenes** are where Build mode lives. Sun position, populators, asset placements, the scene outliner – all per-scene.
* **Shots** are where Compose mode lives. A shot binds its camera to one scene; you can't have a shot that crosses scenes (that's an edit, and edits live in the [Sequence Timeline](/compose/timeline.md)).
* **The auto-prompt** assembles its scene context from the active scene plus the active shot's camera. Switch scenes and the prompt rebuilds.

## When to reach for it

The signal is what's changing in your story. New environment? New scene. Same environment, new angle? New shot. New project? You've changed what you're making.

One sequencing thing worth knowing: name your scenes and your shots. The auto-prompt feeds those names into the model when it constructs the prompt – "the Lamborghini in the Manhattan city street scene" is more useful than "the Lamborghini in scene-2".

## Related

* [The three modes](/overview/concepts/the-three-modes.md)
* [Shots](/compose/shots.md)
* [Animation and shot time](/overview/concepts/animation-and-shot-time.md)
* [Sharing and collaboration](/overview/reference/sharing-and-collaboration.md)


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