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.
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?
(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.
@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.
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.
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.