I am currently creating a massive screenplay. My process for creating the screenplay is: getting familiar with the research area, structuring my story, getting done with everything on the research area, finishing on a whiteboard, and finally writing everything on the script. My problem is that I just finished structuring the story I saw that the whiteboard is a complete mess and when I try to organize it the thing gets even more of a mess! how do I fix this?
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OK. This is easier to understand with more details. So it sounds like you've been adding a lot of empty structure, like acts and blocks and groups, correct? And suddenly it's all jumbled?
If that is the case, 3.0 is the solution. The way empty objects are handled in the (old) version is a terrible design. Basically, the empty objects don't have a location in the whiteboard directly, they find a beat somewhere nearby to attach to. We kind of get away with that when the whiteboard is mostly populated with beats. But when the whiteboard is nearly it melts down to an uncontrollable state. There's no solution, this way of doing it has to go. And it prevents you from delineating the structure before you place any beats, which is a completely valid order to do things in.
In 3.0, everything in the whiteboard has a timeline position, and actually the whole whiteboard is more like the timeline that it really is. So when you put blocks or groups or break markers into the whiteboard, they literally carve out a place for themselves in the sequence that can't be easily upset.
We're putting the finishing touches on 3.0 before taking it to alpha. We hit some small roadblocks on one of our last tasks, or it would already have been out.
The temporary solution to stabilize this is to put enough beats into the whiteboard so that when you untangle the mess, there are enough real things spread out in the whiteboard that all the non-real things have something to attach to. This will then be converted to proper anchoring when your document is opened in 3.0.
The thing is I'm still at the start of the "process" I told you about and I literally just downloaded the app two weeks ago, the app is top tier the only thing I would recommend is to start and think more of the business side of things so you can peacefully add more features like these https://www.forum.hollywoodcamerawork.com/forum/causality-story-sequencer/future-updates-that-i-would-love-to-see-implemented-feel-free-to-add-your-own-reasons-why.
Ever since yesterday, I opened causality went to the script section, I right-clicked, clicked "insert break", scrolled over, and clicked on add acts. After doing so I repeated it with the number of episodes wanted, and also with some save the cat beat sheet features that I wanted to be added. I clicked "ESC" to get out of the script mode and into the whiteboard mode and (I think because I didn't add any beats yet) everything was stacked on top of other stuff, you know
If you haven't maintained the whiteboard at all during a very long process working only in the script and research, then indeed the whiteboard is in an unknown state. When you put things into the script, the app does its best to guess where in the whiteboard it should put it. But it's not assumed that you won't look at the whiteboard at all for months.
What specific mess do you have? The whiteboard is always in time order, so at least left-to-right, it exactly matches what you have in the script.