Referencing multiple cells and removing duplicate values.

Question

Hello.
I have a very complicated question, to be honest I am not totally sure if numbers is capable of handling all of this but it's worth a shot.
I am working on a spreadsheet for organising a film. I've had the templates for years but I'm now using numbers to automate it as much as possible. Everything was going well until I hit the schedule/callsheet.
On other sheets I can tell it to "look up scene two" it will then look up the correct row and find everything I need. On the callsheet however I might say "we're filming scenes two, five and nine" and numbers gets confused with the multiple values, Is there anyway around this?
Also, if there is, I have a more complex question to ask. Is it possible for numbers to find and remove duplicate data? For example lets say scene two and five require Alice, but scene nine requires bob. If numbers just adds that info together it will display the result "Alice Alice Bob", is there a way to get it to parse the text, recognise the duplicate value and remove the unnecessary Alice? 
I realise that numbers has limitations so it may not be able to do everything I want, however every bit I can automate saves me hours so even if I can only get half way there, totally worth it.
Thanks in advance for any help you can offer, all the best.

Answer 1

Ah excellent thank you.
I've modified it to there are now multiple (well only four for now until I get this in better shape) indexes for finding a scene. And assigning each block to a new row.
I only have one slight reservation about this. If I create 10 rows, it totally works, most of the time we'll only shoot three scenes a day so it's just blank space... However Murphy's law will inevitable raise its ugly head and put me in a situation where we are shooting 11 scenes in a day. 
For countif, I think I get what you mean... Kinda. Basicially I would create a cell which combines the character strings from each scene into one long scene. Then I would have 100 extra cells (Lets say 100 so I'll never run out) each linked to the cast list, using the character name as a variable. These cells will each parse through the string to find their character name. If it appears then a true value comes up. This will remove duplicates as each cell will only respond once. So if Alice appears in every scene shooting that day, the cell will still only light up once. Is that it.
One other question. Whenever I combine filled cells with blank cells. I usually gets the data from the filled cells, with a 0 for each blank cell. Usually this isn't a problem, but if I want to keep this flexible then I'll have quite a few blanks. The actor example above could result in 98 zeroes. Is there anyway to have blanks just not show up at all.
I'll email the spreadsheet in a moment, a lot of it is still rough and under construction, but you should be able to see where it's all going hopefully.
Thanks again, you have been extraordinarily helpful.