Saturday, February 16, 2013
Happy Sabbath!
The script is now locked! I’ve printed out draft five, and I’m calling it finished. Yes, we now have a shooting script 🙂 It’s been sent to the team and the response has been positive. I dug out my old eighths ruler that I made a few years ago and calculated the eighths the other day. Although there is software out there that’ll do it for me, I find doing it by hand helps solidify the details of the script in my mind. Wearing all the hats that I do, I have to know the script frontward and backward.
Well, I gave Gorilla a try, but I wasn’t happy. It kept locking up on me so I ditched it a few weeks ago. I’ve spent since then looking for a good replacement for scheduling but nothing was turning up. I was so desperate that I even tried Celtx again, but I had to use Trelby as a middle man to get the script into Celtx and Celtx kept locking up, being extremely buggy. I somehow stumbled upon an article that mentioned Sophocles has a scheduler and even budget module. I managed to acquire the discontinued beta for Sophocles 2007. WAY back when I was in eighth grade, I actually had used Sophocles to write my first attempt at a feature script. While I don’t think I’d consider switching from Final Draft for the writing of a script, I’ve been nothing but happy with its other features.
First off, when I imported the script for Leap 3, I noticed that it gave me a runtime count, in minutes, along the side of the page. That’s really cool. Leap 3, though a 97 page script, should run 93 minutes according to the count. I discovered the software has an auto-schedule feature, so next I added location details and told the software when certain actors are available. I then ran the auto-schedule and it it gave me a good start for a shooting schedule. Pretty smart AI. I also gave the budget module a once over and I think it’ll do the job nicely. It’s a shame that the company went bankrupt, but I’m glad I found the beta copy. You can be sure that I’ll hang on to it incase I ever need to re-install.
In other Leap 3 news, a friend of mine, Kimberly Cruz (she played the reporter in Leap 2) has really stepped up to the plate and shown some real initiative as a producer. She has a potential source that she is approaching for funding. She is also very interested in playing the role of Kati. Welcome to the team, Kim!
