Comments on: Get a “God’s-Eye View” of Your Story

By: Rafael Andrés Becerra

Rafael Andrés Becerra — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 05:05:00 +0000

Thanks!!!!! Amazing and very useful, I was wondering how I could use Excel for my writing!!!!
…Just realize you wrote some of the most precious moments of my childhood!!! Greetings from Colombia!!!!

By: Adriano Ferrari

Adriano Ferrari — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 17:44:00 +0000

Very well said. It’s impossible to keep a whole story in your head. There is a tool that’s designed to solve exactly this problem.
https://www.gingkoapp.com

It’s a tree-structure tool that lets you see the big picture and the details at the same time, and quickly navigate your story.

By: Paul Clarke

Paul Clarke — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 12:08:00 +0000

Great advice. It’s impossible to hold 110 pages of screenplay in your consciousness at once and make sense of it.

Take a step back, work on it in parts.

Thanks for the tip.

By: Phillip Gruneich

Phillip Gruneich — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 09:25:00 +0000

True, Excel is a wonderful tool. However OmniOutliner does a superb job here and i’ve been using it lately. It’s funny how people use color: everyone has a very specific way. I use to illustrate the emotional focus of the scene, red is the climax, for example. This is nice to remind me when i need a comic relief, for example. I like to use OmniOutliner because it is smaller and allows you to build inside a scene. I always attach notes with dialogue ideas, as those are not good to go away whenever you get a nice one.

And i always recommend after viewing the story as a whole to expand it horizontally. This is the horizontal outline i’ve done for a short film last year: https://cl.ly/image/3n0o1B2e0t2q. It is in portuguese, but first row is act, second is timeline, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th are scene elements (i had to control 4 characters in most scenes, so this gave me track on what each of them were doing), you may include as many as you want. 7th is a general color scene tag, to preview it dramatically. 8th row is for the scene number.

Why going horizontal? You read horizontally. Not only the words, but everything. You watch a movie left-to-right. So after jolting down all your ideas in vertical to see all of it, i strongly recommend going horizontal. This is the stage in which i’d include Page Estimates, because i use the previous stage to simply get the story out of my head.