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Archives for July 2012

Scriptwriting Software

July 24, 2012 By Mark 1 Comment

Over the past year I’ve been thinking seriously about scriptwriting for the first time in a long time. A few screenplay ideas have offered themselves up as they always do — the majority of them irreverent comedies I’d like to write mostly to entertain my dull self — but I’ve also had a stageplay nagging at me in an uncomfortably persistent manner. As professional writers do when faced with the harrowing prospect of devoting time and energy to new projects, I finally relented to inspiration and budgeted some haphazard internet surfing time to looking at productivity tools as a begrudging means of avoiding any actual work.

Scriptwriting Software in Context
Before I offer up the results of my lackadaisical survey, a word about scriptwriting software in general. Computer technology has advanced so far during the course of my life that where success was once solely determined by performance specifications and productivity, high-tech hardware and software are now indisputably fashion-first industries. Precisely because everything from processing power to storage can be had in generic abundance for literal pennies, the marketplace is now more concerned with metrics like hipness, cultural relevance and branding than reliability and usability. Even something as purportedly revolutionary as the tablet computer is, for all its hype, simply a more comfortable way to kill time on the couch, albeit with panache.

So if you take nothing else from this post, remember: scriptwriting software will not make you a better writer, a more professional writer or a more successful writer. Most of the scripts I worked on for cash money were either written on a typewriter, typed up by someone else on a typewriter or word-processing program, or written by me on a computer using a now-defunct commercial package of macros compatible with various versions of Microsoft Word. Even when dedicated scriptwriting applications hit the market I stayed with my old-school methods, and I don’t remember feeling as if my work suffered. In fact, to the contrary, I often had a sense of smug satisfaction when I encountered grumbling comments from early-adopting and agitated peers who hd slaved themselves to a fussy proprietary formatting program. Life lesson: be very leery of installing an additional layer of balky complexity between you and your work.

A decade later, when I was primarily writing for interactive companies my work flow became even simpler. I still used Word, but instead of buying a new version of macros ever year or two for each new bloated release from Microsoft, I grabbed a small set of freeware macros off the internet that covered 99% of the formatting I intended to use. Small customizations to the default settings covered the rest, and all without so much as a separate interface or complex control-key learning curve.

Whether I’m really, truly interested in writing a script (or two, or five) I don’t know. One thing I am sure of, however, is that for the time being I’ll be happier pretending those shiny new ideas in my head won’t go to waste, so looking at scriptwriting software seems a reasonable response in any case. It’s probably been eight years since I used even the simplest tools for scriptwriting, and if I’m going to revisit that mode of storytelling I should probably do so cognizant of the latest tools. Particularly if the features I care about most are available in a single product, eliminating any need on my part to create workarounds or hacks, or to once again bend Word to my rusty iron will.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: ~ Tangents Tagged With: playwriting, screenwriting, tools

Simulation as Story

July 19, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

Long before last year’s grisly crash of a highly-modified P-51 Mustang at the Reno Air Races, I fell madly in love with that iconic airplane. Between building model kits as a kid, to having the good fortune to have a P-51 hangared at the local airport, which I could peddle to on my bike on a sunny summer day (here’s the actual plane in the actual hangar), to the unmistakeable sound of its engine, every interaction I had with the Mustang’s perfect combination of form and function seduced me. Its power, its speed, its capability, its history — the more I learned and the more I exposed myself to that machine the more it became indelibly etched in my mind.

So when the personal computer came along, and people started making flight simulators, and flying games based on simulations, you know I eagerly anticipated the day when I could take a virtual P-51 into the skies. And when the PC developed to the point that full combat simulations were being created, often including dozens of planes in the air at the same time, and high-end joysticks hit the market with multiple functions including rudder, throttle and trigger controls, not only was I personally thrilled, but to my surprise the market for such products exploded. In fact, only a decade ago the world was awash in flight simulators of every imaginable kind.

So what happened? Where did all those flight sims go? Well, one limitation of flight sims is that they model 3-D space that you can’t actually experience. Yes, you can swivel your view around using keys on your keyboard or joystick, but it’s a very constrained view of what should literally be wide-open sky. Too, the inevitable feature-creep that infects all tech products (think Microsoft Word, which currently includes 2,016 functions that no human being has ever actually used), began driving a bigger and bigger wedge between players who wanted fun and players who wanted historical accuracy.

One of the most interesting aspects of the rise and fall of flight-sim software is not so much the fall but the rise. I don’t have sales figures handy, but I do know there were flight-sim titles all over the place, which seems a bit odd when you consider that even back in the day very few people were lamenting or protesting the lack of flight sims in the global marketplace. Even when flight sims were selling like hotcakes I suspect they didn’t top the list of games most consumers wanted to play. So why the popularity?

The answer lies in the central processing unit. Computers are good at one thing more than anything else, and that’s calculating. As long as the math can be programmed, computers can spit out results with dizzying speed and unerring accuracy. This leads to the potential not only for modeling complex processes like flight, but for allowing those processes to be affected by user inputs — which in turns leads to the intriguing idea of interactivity. (My definition of this badly abused term here.)  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Interactive Tagged With: interactive entertainment, story

Writing is Work

July 2, 2012 By Mark Leave a Comment

Whether you’re a dabbler, seasoned pro or tortured soul, pressing keys on a keyboard takes time. The more time you have available, and the more disciplined you are about protecting that time, the more productive you will be as a writer.

PCMag.com has an article up today about telecommuting and productivity, but because all writing is work — whether you’re getting paid or not — anyone trying to find regular writing hours at home can profit from the piece.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: ~ Tangents Tagged With: process, writing