Hi, Per!
First of all I wold like to thank you and your team for the great software.
I found it quite recently and was really impressed by its features, approach and plans of the developers.
Great work!
I am close to recognizing The Causality as an ideal program for developing and recording story )
But I'm missing one little thing.
Now I use a bunch of Aeon Timeline (for scheduling) and Scrivener (to write the script).
And the only thing in which The Causality is inferior to them is the lack of a chronological timeline.
In Aeon Timeline all events are first placed on a chronological timeline with reference to dates and times, if necessary. And then, in narrative mode, we can choose in which sequence these events will be located in the script. So we simultaneously see both the real sequence of events in the world of story, and the sequence of presenting events to the viewer/reader.
This is an extremely valuable feature, especially for complex stories, for example, detective stories, where the chronology of events is extremely important, sometimes up to a second.
In The Causality we can work in almost the same way, just by muting events that we don't want to show in the script and have the chronological timeline on the whiteboard, but at the same time we have problems with the events:
a) events do not have a date/time;
b) flashbacks/flashforwards is out of place because we have to place them in the place where they will be shown to the viewer, and not in the place where they are chronologically.
My questions are:
1. Are you planning to add a chronological timeline function?
I think the presence of this function will significantly expand the application areas of The Causality and the number of customers.
2. What is the best way to work with flashbacks/flashforwards in the current version of The Causality?
Thank you!
Hi Per,
I see that you are releasing new versions, improving work with locations - this is cool, congratulations!
But I'm still struggling with finding the optimal way to display a story with a complex chronology in Causality (think of Christopher Nolan's Memento).
And here is an example I found on the website of another software for making scripts (if necessary, I can give a link).
For example, if I have a story that’s jumping around between the present and the past:
A - In 2019 at 1pm I face off with a burglar
B - In 1990 I’m failing a homework assignment
C - In 2019 at 2pm the burglar is beating me up
D - In 1994 I’m running away from a problem
E - In 2019 at 3pm I valiantly get back up and chase down the burglar.
Sequence of events A-B-C-D-E represents the narrative how will the audience see it.
But sequence B-D-A-C-E represents the chronological order of events.
If I place the first sequence on the whiteboard Causality, I will lose the second, and vice versa.
Whiteboard allows me to store only one of the sequences.
It is inconvenient to store the second sequence in Research, because we lose the visual display of history (tags, groups, acts, etc.) - the main feature of Causality.
It would be possible to store one sequence in the Mind Maps area, but it does not allow storing beats, but only folders.
It would be possible to create a separate lane for the chronology and hide these beats in the script, but one beat cannot be on two lanes at the same time.
While I'm confused... )
I'm asking for help )
I am sure you will solve this problem in the best way in the future, but I would like to use Causality right now )
Do you (or maybe any of the Causality users) have any ideas on how to optimally solve the problem of simultaneous visual display of chronological and narrative orders of events in the current version of the program?
Thanks.
Hi,
There's some of this that you already have. Since research is ordered any way you want, it's no problem to put a storyline in chronological order by simply arranging the beats in a folder that way, but then actually deliver them in a completely different order when you drop them into the whiteboard. I know it's not a timeline with specific times for when that matters. But it does encapsulate the concept of a series of events as they happened being different from the order they're delivered in.
We are playing with the concept of beats having a chronological time where they happen, but we're not sold on this just being a timeline. Yes, if you're doing the exact sinking of the Titanic, maybe it matters. But if you're doing Back To The Future, it's more that a bunch of beats happen in the afternoon, and a bunch of other beats happen later in the afternoon. So we're interested in being able to paint with a broader brush, so you're not tasked with babysitting the exact time each single beats happens, and constantly maintaining such a detail timeline, when the only thing you really care about is that these 40 beats happen Wednesday afternoon in that order.
Our main reason for this feature would actually be to make a graph we've tentatively called Time Zones, where one time zone is present day Wednesday to Friday, and another time zone will be The Murder in 1858. The graph would be one of the many graphs in the timeline, and would help you understand how you're narratively jumping backwards and forwards in time, and understanding how you spend your time in present day or in 1858. It would be less clear about the exact order each individual event is delivered in, because the goal is more to get an overall sense of the flow of time in your story.
In terms of having a second chronological timeline, we'd probably do that as well, although it wouldn't just be a single real-world timeline. Rather, it would be multiple timelines, each represent a specific section of time. A time travel story with a moment repeating would also make a separate time zone for each parallel version of the same event, so that they can turn out differently. Each would be a section of time that we're choosing to treat as an item.
The problem with a chronological timeline is as I said that it forces you to make a decision about every single beat even when you only care in broad strokes, which I think is the primary use case. Without some new invention, we'd be forcing people into a lot of babysitting, not just once, but every single time they add events. The good use case for a chronological timeline is something where the exact chronology matters. But I'd venture to say that the same thing is a frustrating feature for more garden-variety storytelling. A feature set would have to be invented to only have granularity if you absolutely care about it. We would not want most users to spend a lot of time creating underlying timelines.
But point is, this has been thought about long and hard, and we're still not satisfied we have the right solution. I don't love how this is done in the other apps you mention, and we'd like to try to crack what your true cognitive benefit is, and then work towards giving you a sense of insight for each use case. There are so, so many features that look good on paper but then turn out to not really give you the mental pop you thought it would. We're being careful with this, because it's an invasive feature, and once you release it, you can't go back, even if it's wrong.
But the hold up for these kinds of features right now is that we have our hands massively full with sync/collaboration, emotion tracking, some AI where appropriate, and mobile apps.