As the structure of the show evolves, my thoughts on the scene follow it around through the timeline.
Since I’m working as an editor, I use this to write down observations about each scene as I work on it, things that don’t necessarily easily translate to a “to do” item. Act 3 and act 2 might be better swapped? Go for it. When you switch back to the text view, the writing which corresponded to the card is now rearranged to match. What’s cool here is that you’ve got a normal looking text file….but if you switch to the notecard view, you can rearrange whole sections just by holding a card and moving it where you want.
You can then drop down an “outline” menu, and then pin that to the side of the screen, and see the outline simulaneously to the full document. I end up with a document that looks like any normal word processing document. I then outline the show – type a description of the scenes I know will be coming in – and use the handy style overlay to categorize the lines. I choose screenplay, as that fits my needs most closely (you’re really choosing what set of predefined styles are assigned to the document). You’re then asked to choose plain text, novel, or screenplay. What I do is mostly ignore those folders (labelled “Characters”, “Settings” and images – more on them later), and just create a new “text” document. When you create a new project, it gets filled out automatically with some folders you can use, or ignore. This is how a show gets done, and it is very easy to do with Storyist. On an iPad, or on a Mac.īang out that outline. Storyist allows you to make notes in outline form and then view that outline as notecards, as well as to keep a separate section with reference materials. You can sync Scrivener with Index Card and Notebooks – but that really just exposes a portion of the whole tool to each app.)Īs it happens, Storyist got to the iPad last summer, and I’ve been happily using it since. But for the way I used Scrivener, these felt like extra work. (For Scrivener diehards, you have some options to get your stuff on an iPad. These days, I’m all iOS for my edit “support system”, which means I’d been looking for a way to replace Scrivener. But time marches on and as much as I love Scrivener the developer has been very dedicated to keeping its resources focused and only very recently announced that it would do an iOS version. It was definitely a big help and I wish I could tell you that I was still using it everyday. Scrivener helps you put it all in one place.įor several years after that project I used Scrivener on every single show I worked on, as a place to keep my own notes and supplemental materials. There are several tools in Scrivener that were invaluable in that process – the combination of outline and notecards, and the ability of Scrivener to function as a research binder where you can compile your own notes as well as other relevant documents (government reports, newspaper articles, web clippings, really anything). The three years of footage that we were attempting to distill ended up making a lot more sense once we were able to condense sections of it and see more clearly what we really had. That combination allows you to group your thoughts by subject and then rearrange them you can fill in details about each section of the show and have those notes follow that information as you rearrange it within the outline. Where Scrivener was such an amazing help was that it works both as a nesting outline and as a virtual corkboard. It was a complicated show we were trying to tell the story of a single family at the same time we told the story of both political and economic battles being fought in the state of Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina.
On the Frontline “The Old Man and the Storm”, there was a point where we had filled four cork boards with index cards to try and sort out the story we needed to tell. I think I can say without exaggeration that Scrivener helped turn around at least one film I worked on. The other big app in the category is Scrivener, and that’s the one I used first. Tools that help you visualize overall story structure, manage research, and work on the writing all at once.įor almost a year, I’ve been using one of these tools on my iPad (and desktop) called Storyist. But the truth is that now there are plenty of writing tools that are designed to be a bit more helpful to a writer than simply being a fancy typewriter. No one loves it, but they use it because the client requires you to deliver the script in a table with cell numbers on each line, to make it easy for the lawyers, I suppose. In documentary and the reality shows I’ve worked on, everyone uses Microsoft Word for writing.