Hi there, i just received your email, downloaded Causality 4.0 Alpha, and the Terminator script, and i have both the time & a high risk tolerance, and the wish to help- how do i get to participate in the testing?
Hi Jill,
Great! Actually, you help just by running it. Even though we’re calling it an Alpha, it’s actually by far the most stable Causality to date. I can’t remember when I last crashed.
That said, we’re looking for “stupid” crashes. All of the internal signaling in the app has been torn out and rebuilt, and some parts of the UI may not have been hooked back up. For example, we know from other testers that the Paragraph Styles dialog is misbehaving, and crashing, and not remembering settings. It’s stuff like this that’s the purpose of the Alpha.
It’s that, and just using the new feature-set, especially Emotion Tracking.
Thanks!
Per
I can’t wait to try it!
Quick question: Can I have both the V4 alpha and V3 stable installed on a Mac at the same time? I can’t yet commit to V4 for commercial work, but I’d like to test drive it.
Hi,
Others have selected to keep the old version, so it should be possible. We haven’t changed much by way of system-wide settings, which is an incompatibility you could otherwise worry about.
Be aware that the scripts are not backward compatible.
FYI, 4.0 is easily the most stable version of Causality to date. In my last round of working and testing, I had literally zero issues working for several weeks.
Per
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Hi,
Also be aware that the resetting of the counter is not yet in 4.0, but it’s definitely soon. It’s a quite easy feature to do.
Per
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Congrats for theses great new features in Causality 4.0 ! I was wondering : i can’t see the AI functions ? Where are they ?
Hi,
Thanks for posting! They’re in the right-click menu for beats in the script. Right-click the beat title.
Okay, now, for episode six, I’m using Causality 4.0. Yeah!
I’ve got a fundamental question:
I use tags and lanes to track character storylines. I find this technique valuable, but from prior conversations, @perholmes says that’s not precisely correct.
For this new episode, I’d like to learn the correct approach.
What I need most is for character storyline sequences to stand out in the whiteboard. I currently use colored tags for that, but I also use lanes because it lets me see the clean, linear storylines.
I should note that there’s a lot intercutting. Typically, there are five storylines (as lanes), usually two major plots, two sub-plots, and one for “everything else”. The storylines rarely interact. Each is independent.
Would it make sense to switch from lanes to blocks for storylines?
Hi,
Yes. Lanes are bad except for things that are completely separate. Good candidates for lanes are things like A/B storylines in a sitcom which are so separate they don’t even have to be in the same episode. Lanes are also good for staging ideas. But lanes as storylines basically doesn’t work, and it’s not even about software. If you tried to do it with sticky-notes on a wall, you’d have the same problem of intercutting.
So there’s some design difficulty here, because when lanes exist as a feature, we can’t control how people use them, and 99% of everybody watches no videos and reads no docs, so the software itself has to encourage or discourage the right behavior, which it doesn’t. We’re even considering a warning on the app when you try to create your third lane, giving us an opportunity to explain why you shouldn’t have many lanes.
To your question, the ideal use for blocks is as segments, some task that’s achieved that spans maybe 10-20 pages. It can exist in parallel with other blocks. Blocks are great, because they allow you to reason about the story structure at a higher level, especially when you zoom out.
If you look at the Terminator 2 sample document, this is in my view a correct use of blocks. When the terminators are converging on the hospital while Sarah is trying to break out, that’s exactly three parallel blocks carrying out three tasks in the story. Yes, they cross-cut a lot, but the closer the cross-cuts can be to each other visually, the easier it is to understand. So see blocks as a task or a segment of a larger storyline.
You should use blocks for hands-on business in the story, getting from A to B, convincing somebody of something, basically for the materialistic parts of the story, who, what, where etc.
And then you should use tags/emotions for all intellectual things, like character traits, themes, feelings, and anything that’s long-running. Basically, all these “energies” in the story are guaranteed to cross-cut, and that means that you can’t organize your story around them.
Example: In Terminator 2, there’s a theme of "can a machine learn human values?”. That’s done as a tag, because it comes back here and there, effectively at random. We’re writing a beat, we end up talking about machines having values, and this beat gets tagged. This is fine.
But if you had made an actual lane for “can a machine learn human values?”, you’d now have to move this beat into this lane. And if you had multiple of such things, you’d need the same beat to exist in multiple lanes, which we tried for a while, and besides being a technical nightmare (it was the cause of 90% of our bugs because it was uncontrollable), it makes the whiteboard much harder to understand in general.
So:
- Blocks for materialistic parts of the story, getting from A/B, reaching a sub-objective etc.
- Tags/Emotions for anything long-running or the least bit intellectual.
Building Causality is a mission of finding some way to handle story visually, and since nothing really existed, we’ve been trying every combination for over a decade. We’re trying to figure out how to do this kind of thing, and I think we’ve arrived at a few truths about how such an app necessarily has to be made.
But I don’t think we’re there yet. When the iPad came out, Apple didn’t know the ultimate best use case, and it’s the same for us. We’re figuring it out together.
Per
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What a great post. Thank you.