Auto-copy (or macro advice) beat title to script text

Causality Story Sequencer
1

I welcome any ideas.

I want to create beats directly in whiteboard without opening the editor and just type beat title and then somehow automatically copy the title to the script text. I can explain why I need this if someone really needs to know why, but anyway, that’s the functionality I’m looking for.

I can do this relatively quickly in the script window just with the mouse and copy and paste, but I’m wondering if anyone has an idea how to automate this. If I could figure out how to do it with hotkeys, I could use my macro pad to speed things up.

2

Hi,

It sounds like this ought to just be a feature that just automatically populates the script with the beat title. The feature would probably have to be off by default, because it works against the workflow that I’d consider more typical, that you create a beat and immediately go into writing the beat.

I’d like to understand the use case, because the beats that are created in the script already have the beat title above it. So isn’t it kind of double-duty to also copy the text into the script? Or is this because you’re running with beat titles hidden in the script?

Per

3

(just a comment) The workflow that I usually employ with Causality is to create empty beats with only titles, mapping out basic structure in the White Board, and only after I have this skeleton do I go in and write the beats’ content. In other words, I work out the details after I have a general schematic of the plot.

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4

@tekkonkinkreet For you personally, is there value in the beat title automatically being copied into the beat text?

For me personally, it has no value. I can see the beat title, and I don’t need the text repeated. So I’m trying to understand the use case for the beat title automatically being copied into the script text.

5

Not so important for me, though I sometimes put the synopsis text in the script as placeholder, and sometimes the “synopsis” is just rough script prose.

6

I think I understand Michael’s request.

I often use a simple outliner to create the primary character beats for an entire 50 minute episode. It’s possible to bang it out in about an hour because you’re not fighting a GUI. The flow is: type a beat, type the next beat, then the next, then move them up or down to get the sequence.

During this process, your head is totally into the character details/flow and how they drive the plot. You don’t want any operational distractions from the software. It’s bang, bang, bang.

Then, I’d like to import that into Causality as beats (one per line) that I can now get arranged on the whiteboard.

7

I still don’t fully understand the use case for this.

8

The primary request: easily import a collection of beats from a text file into causality.

The text file format: one beat per line. First sentence in each line becomes the beat title.

Why? Super efficient. I can create 50 beats in 1 second. (During development, beats are often created in Google docs. I want to get them into Causality as easily as possible.)

Maybe there’s a way to do this already?

9

Hi,

There is a way to do something similar, but it might be enabled just for novels, which I’d question.

The feature is that every time it encounters a certain magic string, “***” by default, it breaks the text into a beat.

Now, you should know that the direction we’re going in is to have AI automatically summarize the beat text into titles and synopsis (which are just summarizations of different lengths). There are some users who use this religiously, and for me personally, it works so well that I’ve stopped checking its output.

We’ve done tricks before with just grabbing the first sentence, but it actually doesn’t work that well if you’re importing a script. The first sentence might say “Bob sits down”. Not very descriptive as a title.

Now, what you’re requesting is that the first sentence is the beat title. That’s already kind of limited, because what if you want two sentences sometimes? And then you’ll have to basically write that again for the best text of the synopsis, duplicating your effort. And should the subsequent text then go into the synopsis or the beat itself?

What if instead you simply write, and break it once in a while with ***, and then the AI summarizes the text into the synopsis and beat title? Look at the Terminator 2 demo. All the beat titles and synopsis are auto-generated, and they’re perfect end to end. No matter how AI-skeptical one is, a language model will do better raw text processing than a human 99% of the time. It’s what it does.

I’m just saying that the suggestion is a very limited use case, and there’s no room for anyone to want it differently, without a complex UI to configure it. First sentence only? First and second sentence only? Alternating paragraphs of title/text/title/text. You could invent this feature many different ways, so we’re not just forcing one exact way on every user.

So the version of this that I believe in the most is that the novel importer beat-breaker feature is brought to screenplays, and then the titles and synopsis are just automatically summarized from your larger beat text. Then you can truly “just write”. The beat titles will be 99% good and useful.

10

I agree that AI does a great job with summary lines, especially with script importing.

But, let me give you the problem I’m trying to solve…

Episodes get developed though a wild combination of “inputs”. These all get organized into an outline in Google docs.

The top level of the outline is the storyline (often character-based.) Three to five per episode. The next level are the major beats of that storyline, then minor beats sometimes appear below those.

Once that’s solid, those storylines need to be “merged” (intercut). Here’s where Causality’s whiteboard is a big win, and why beat titles are critical.

Goal: I don’t want to manually add each beat in the UI. I want to suck in the outline, then go from there.

And, a plus would be to automatically tag all the outline beats specific to their top level. In other words, all “story A” beats would be tagged that way, then “story B” etc.

11

Hi,

So, I’m not necessarily arguing against being able to import a list and have it split automatically. That feature already exists for novels, and if you could live with having to put *** in front of each split, then we’d just need to allow that for beats as well. Combined with automatic beat titles, I think you’d already be very close to what you’re after possibly even less effort.

But it just sounds like this is something you should be allowed to easily do inside of Causality. The workflow with Google Docs is in part constructed in order to work around missing features in Causality, so I’d like to finish exploring what it would take to do the whole workflow in Causality. There are some upsides that are genuinely better. So here follows a what-if:

  • What if the splitting text by magic characters wasn’t limited to importing, but something you could do anywhere? Then you could write a whole sequence within a single beat, which is really just a text editor at this point, and have it split into beats at your command? Maybe this could become a new go-to brainstorming feature, and maybe many storylines, long and short, would start this way. You pound your ideas into a single beat, and then have it simply split into many beats when you’re done brainstorming.
  • All the split beats would benefit from character detection (and upcoming tag and emotion detection) because they’re already real inside the project.
  • All the split beats would already be in the right lane or block or however you organize. If you have a lane for each A/B storyline, and you want to add 10 beats to storyline B, you’d put a single beat in lane B where you want everything to start, splitball your ideas, and it split by magic characters when you’re ready. Then they land exactly where they’re supposed to go. No importing, having it land in a new Import lane in the wrong place, moving them to the right place, cleaning behind you.
  • With collaboration in Causality, lots of writers could be splitballing storylines this way, all already living in more or less the right place to begin with, so there’s practically no babysitting in getting things to the right place.
  • You can jump into actual screenwriting while spit-balling (i.e. a scriptment). So some beats are just a headline. Others are good ideas for dialogue you had, already formatted as screenplay, but you’re still in spit-balling mode.

This model depends on:

  • A feature to Split Beat By Magic Word…, where you simply have to confirm the magic string, e.g. ***. Or perhaps just by paragraph, so every paragraph represents a beat.
  • Bulk Auto Beat Titles. Currently, you have to trigger a title for each beat.
  • Collaboration, so everyone can be in the same space.

From how I understand your ultimate workflow, the above is superior. And even if you have someone on your team who isn’t a collaborator in Causality, all you have to do is take the Google Doc or email or WhatsApp message, paste it into a beat, and split it.

I feel like this could be a winner, and I think I’d personally use that feature right away.

It would also be great for AI, actually, for people who want to do that. You could prompt it to “Give me a beat-by-beat rundown of Luke Skywalker’s character arc in Episode 4, but his name should be Derek, and this is about fighting against a corporate takeover of the cardboard factory where he works. Separate each beat by “***”, and it’s OK to write a few lines of dialogue here and there”. This would extract a storyline from something else and dump it as beats right into the whiteboard in the right place.

I feel that stuff like that is a much better use of AI in creative endeavors, to create elements that you can use as scaffolding, rather than wholesale write thing. And none of this will end up in the final result, it’s just a place to start. Like Save The Cat, which hopefully also doesn’t end up in the end result.

Per

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12

Yes, that approach would work quite well. Great for brainstormed beat lists.

And, I like the “inheritance” of the source beat’s tags and block for the new beats. Good idea there.

PS: my current workaround: importing Fountain text files. As you know, Causality converts Fountain “=” synopsis lines to beat titles. (The downside being the need for scene headers to delimit each.)

So, maybe make your magic string an “=”?

13

Hi,

With the novel importer, you can choose your own magic string, and I thought that it was important to have it be configurable, just in case your script naturally contains a lot of “***”. But I would expand on it and also be able to break into beats by paragraph, which would probably work well for a beat sheet. You’d just have to stay within one paragraph per beat.

This feature is actually remarkably easy to do, so I’ll move it to the top of the list.

The automatic titles and synopsis done in bulk will have to wait both for a UI and collection mechanism that tracks what needs to be updated, as well as a billing system, because that part could no longer be completely free – it’s a lot more tokens coming through. But we’re not trying to make money on AI, so it would be nearly a pass-through cost.

I like this feature, and I think I would personally use it a lot.

Per

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