Tin foil

Well, that was a bad week.

I think I can honestly say the last week has been the worst of my fledgling career so far. Horrible just about sums it up; but doesn’t really convey the gut-wrenching fear, disappointment and rage which left me on the verge of tears.

And by ‘verge of tears’ I mean ‘bawling my eyes out, lying curled up on the bathroom floor, wrapped in tin foil and screaming for my mummy’.

Why tin foil?

I don’t know, that’s how upset I was.

Still, it seems to be almost over now and life is becoming sunny again. I may blog about it at some point, but probably not. It’s all a bit embarrassing and totally my fault.

So instead I’m going to talk about some random shit I was too numb to notice during the last seven or eight days.

Like on Monday, when I visited one of the locations for K and watched the fight choreographer put some of the actors through their paces. There were swords and tonfa and … well that’s all I saw; but they were being flung around all over the shop.

Or night club, I suppose.

Then we visited a rooftop location to discuss how we’re going to throw an actor off without it costing too much.

I think hiring twins is the answer.

One who can act and the other who’s suicidal.

I’ve finally discovered what the issue was with the difference in page count – it turns out Final Draft fixed a bug which added the odd blank line into the script. I was running 7.1.1 on my desktop (104 pages) and 7.1.3 on my laptop (102 pages) – which is not a problem until you lock the script for production and suddenly it all goes haywire.

I’m away from home a lot and need to be able to work on the script from both machines.

The solution?

Well, the best solution would have been to update my desktop; but the production team have all been working from the 104 page version. So solution number 2 is to uninstall Final Draft from my laptop and reinstall the older version.

Great, then I can work on the script while I’m out and about.

Except … no, wait. There was a reason why I updated the laptop – it’s running Windows Vista and Final Draft 7.1.1 won’t save as PDF in Vista.

So now I have a script I can work on, but no way of sending it.

Ah, no! I can print the revised pages using a PDF printer (CutePDF – because I like the name).

Okay, now we’re cooking.

Except no, the director can’t open pages printed to PDF, only ones saved as PDF.

Why?

Who fucking knows?

So now I have to send the CutePDF printed pages out to the First AD for distribution, with a one page per scene version for the continuity person.

I’m sure she has a technical name, but I don’t know what it is.

Then I have to email the Final Draft version back home so Mandy can save it as PDF and send it back. Then I can send it to the director.

Yay!

No.

Bugger.

For some reason the text is mostly green. Green is the current revision colour, but it shouldn’t save green text into PDF.

Now I’m really confused; and, as some of you may have noticed, wittering on about PDF formats to stop myself thinking about …

Fuck it, it’s no good.

I need more tin foil.

Sophocles Beta 2007

I got an email this morning (or was it last night?) asking if I’d like to participate in the beta testing of the new Sophocles scriptwriting software.

Now, I don’t know about this. I use Final Draft and I’m quite happy with it. Apart from a few moronic decisions in the early versions  of FD7, namely saving each page as a picture when you convert it to PDF (why?), I have no problems with it and it does everything I want it too.

I don’t really use any of the scene navigator functions or whatever else is in there. I use it for typing and that’s about it. I’m aware people don’t like it and there are other programs which perform better with more functionality; but I really don’t care. It does what I want and that’s fine.

But in the spirit of curiousity, I’ve downloaded Sophocles and had a look. First impressions?

There are things all over the screen! Hundreds of things, what are they? Buttons, tabs, menus … what the fuck is all this?

I had to switch it off and have a little lie down.

I’m back now and I’ve had another look. At a second glance I still find it quite confusing, I think it will take a while to get used to what it all does. I also find it quite weird that the default setting puts the ‘paper’ in a small window to one side instead of in front of you. And you don’t get page breaks, just a continuous stream of paper with thirty second intervals marked on the side. No page numbers? How does that work? I like page numbers.

I’ve just checked to see if it actually does have page numbers or not and I couldn’t find the program. It’s not in the programs list in my start menu, where the hell is it? Oh right, I’ve found it. What the hell is it doing over there? Nope, no page numbers.

There is an option to switch it to a page view, but that just puts a thin dotted line across the endless page. Every now and then Word does something like this and I hate it. I like the pages to look as much like a piece of paper as possible. The other problem is the explorer at the side. When I worked out how to get rid of it, the paper moved to the centre, but the text is too small to read. I’m trying to find a way to enlarge the view, but I’ve no idea how.

Right, I’ve found that.

And we’re off. Okay, so this is starting to make sense now. The story outlining aspects might be useful; but I like to do those on a piece of paper first, then move to a board so I can get a total overview. I’m not sure I like having the scenes on the screen, I find shifting my attention to another medium helps me think about things in a different way. I guess it’s something I could get used to and is useful if I’m writing away from home.

This then is the real test, if all I want it to do is exactly what my pre-existing software already does, then how much use is it to me? It’s a bit different and I could get used to it, but do I want or need to get used to a different program?

I’ll give it a fair run, though. I’ve got a script which needs a re-write so I’ll do it on Sophocles, see how it goes and report back.

Don’t take my word for it though, try it for yourself. The beta version is available for all and sundry here:

www.sophocles.net/beta