Full script

Am capable of creating beats, moving them and putting them into groups. how to work beats and write scripts simultaneously is a bit of a confusion for me

Certainly you also write text into the beat, I was taking that for granted. The point is more that I'm trying to probe if this itself is a difficulty, or if the difficulty is somewhere else.

I'm still not clear on whether you're uncertain about any of the following:

* Creating beats

* Moving beats

* Putting beats into groups

* Moving beats in the script

* Writing beats in the script

Are you clear on all of the above?

Well. I think this tool is not just about rearranging beats. This is where I also write my script in the script editor like how I write in final draft.

rearranging beats make it an outlining tool. Correct ? Do you think that is the purpose of causality ?.

But still, I need to be clear, do you feel secure in putting beats onto the whiteboard and rearranging them? Do you feel secure in putting beats into groups?

Because if you're able to do these things, you could in theory make a full stop right there and use Causality for a lifetime without ever doing anything else. Then it's just sticky notes on a wall.

I'm just trying to probe whether you're trying to be too advanced. Because what I just described is almost everything you'll ever do in Causality. And then you can pick up more advanced features as the need arises. You don't need to do understand ICC Color Profiles in order to resize an image in Photostop.

But yes, there will be more videos that are about how to think about story in Causality. But even the existing tutorials do a lot of that. For example, the Research tutorial talks at length about how to organize your ideas and character traits and take them into use in the story. Another tutorial talks about working backwards, i.e. making the last beat first and then filling in earlier beats to get you there. Did you watch these tutorials?

“I think you're more after tutorials that are about how to think about your story in Causality.“

this exactly is the problem. My problem is not about the story. My problem is how to think about it with this tool. This tool can be an amazing thing. This can be a avid for screenwriting if there is a little more help. I ask this help here because there is no one I KNOW from my country who uses causality. So there is nowhere I can go for help since it’s a new software. Like you said there is no community of causality yet. But there can be one if there is more help

A scene can be one beat or multiple. A short scene might just be one beat. A kitchen scene in Modern Family will fire off 10 beats from different storylines within just a couple of pages. That's a scene with 10 beats.

It's perfectly fine whatever granularity you want to work at. One beat per scene is fine. But if you have a 3 page scene that's just one beat, chances are that it's just a lot of words and the story doesn't move forward.

Rearranging the beats in the whiteboard will rearrange them in the script, and vice versa. That's supposed to happen. Certainly, beats will eventually have to be written to flow nicely into each other, but if you're at the stage where you're making big changes to the sequence of beats, you're also at too early a stage to think much about how the beats are flowing into each other. Just write the beats so they work on their own, shuffle them in the order you like, and when the order is stabilizing you can start thinking about polishing how they flow into each other.

In the script menu, there's a feature called Track Sequence Changes. When you enable this, it tracks which beats are neighbors, and reminds you with red lines between beats where the sequence has changed. This is your cue to check if they still flow nicely into each other.

Hi,

I'm preparing a classic script for Causality, adapting it to how it would look if it was done in there in the first place.

Keep in mind that the vast majority of Adobe or Avid training is made by the community. That will eventually happen for Causality as well, but until then, it's all on us.

The video tutorials are exactly about how to use the software, i.e. which button to push. I think you're more after tutorials that are about how to think about your story in Causality.

Keep in mind that Causality is in large part just the wheelbarrow you use to move your beats around, so Causality alone won't solve every difficulty you have in figuring out how to structure a story. That is in some ways a mystery, even to seasoned writers. So it's important to draw a line between a Causality problem and a story problem in general.

And again, my hunch would still be that you're trying to be too advanced. Am I correct in assuming that you have no difficulty placing beats on the whiteboard and moving them around? That's 90% of what you'll ever do in Causality, and there's no shame if you don't do anything else.

Groups and Boxes are just bigger boxes around beats, so you can move them around with a bigger handle. If you have a chase sequence, it would be frustrating to have to move every beat in individually. Instead you just put them into a block and move the block as a whole.

Are you able to do the things mentioned in this post? I'm just trying to gage where the difficulty is.

It would be great if there is a tutorial where a guy shows how he uses the software Like how we find plenty of tutorials for avid, premier pro where they actually show you the process. So everyone will get a hang of it and discover their own processes

Well, it’s difficult to explain since different beats can fall inside a same scene, so moving around beats can also cause changes inside the script . So sometimes when we move beats, the continuity and flow of script changes Drastically and it makes me redo the whole thing. So on what basis, should I create the beats? what is the basic difference between a scene and a beat ?

so should we create the beats like how we outline a story first ? And then start writing the scene ? Because I discover the story as I write along , it need not be like I should outline first and then start writing

all I am saying is I am a noob here and I don’t know how to approach the software. Final draft and celtx is where I just keep writing. But here it’s more complex. I understand complex is good for making a script rich, it’s just that it just needs more help

The tutorial videos on youtube helped me a lot. Even if you do not know English, you can turn on subtitles with translation. Everything is extremely simple and clear.

It is a pity that the tutorial videos are made only for the main features of Causality.

It would be great to know where your obstacles are. This is a feedback we get from some people, and we're not sure what to do. Causality is just beats in boxes that you can move around.

My impression is that since the program has advanced features, people sometimes feel obligated to use all of them, and then feel that it's too much. But you're not using the app wrong if you're simply rearranging beats, that's the meat and potatoes of what Causality does.

It's difficult to get people to share scripts, although we do know of well-known filmmakers who are nearing production on things made in Causality -- enough that our still limited production features are becoming a problem.

Would you be able to articulate what you find confusing? It doesn't have to be precise explanations, just any area that feels foggy to you.

Also, Version 3.0 coming out soon deals assertively with things that we know to be confusing. For example, beats and snippets are no longer separate things, they're just beats. And subtext beats are being merged into tags. This gets rid of two concepts that we know people found confusing, without loss of functionality. It's possible that you got stuck on a feature with a strange name, even if the functionality was actually simple. That kind of stuff is gone in 3.0.