Causality Tutorials

Causality Story Sequencer
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Hi everyone,

I’ve been using Causality for a couple of days now and I’m really impressed by how powerful and unique it is. However, I don’t find any complete tutorials or full example projects that explain how to use it from start to finish — especially compared to other screenwriting tools on the market that have a lot more learning content.

If anyone knows of any great learning resources — video tutorials, project breakdowns, or even sample files that show a full workflow — I’d really appreciate your suggestions.

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Hi,

There’s a whole new batch of tutorials coming, and the old tutorials will be delisted. Many of the old tutorials are actually half-decent, except that many things are called something else now, and that’s infinitely confusing.

But we totally hear you, and all the tutorials are in the process of being replaced. We’ve just focused on getting version 4.0 to be as stable as possible. It’s a big release, and a stable app is even more important than tutorials.

Have you downloaded the Terminator 2 sample script? This also functions as a feature walk-through, and a recommendation for how to structure a story.

Per

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Hi Perhomles and thenaks for replay
I’ve recently been studying the Terminator sample project and found it very insightful — it really helped me understand several of your structural techniques. That said, I think a clear tutorial path or guided learning series would make it much easier for new users and professionals alike to explore the software’s full potential.
As a director, I’m especially excited about the upcoming Shot List feature Also, do you plan to release in next road map?

Thank you for your time and for continuing to develop such a powerful storytelling tool.

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Thanks!

Indeed, that’s all coming soon!

Per

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can we know when it will be posted? am really interested in this software !

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Hi,

Indeed, where are they? We’re such a small crew, it’s a choice between spending a month making tutorials or spending a month getting us to the features people are demanding the most.

I guess we also have a bit of masochism mixed in, that the software ought to work without instructions, and if it doesn’t, it’s a software problem and not a tutorial problem.

So on that note, would you be able to articulate what stumbling blocks you’re facing, what you don’t understand, what’s stopping you from being able to work in the app? Stuff like that is gold for us.

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am loving the interface … more like Avid for Screenwriting … but am still not able to blend character and plot beats together.. am finding difficulty while developing the Plot… am not a plotter, more of panster … so i would like to develop as i go …am still not understanding “Tags
” …. cant precisely articulate .. but am finding problems in the development stage … rewrites are really good with this software .. after seeing the big picture … i was thinking the tutorials will get me closer

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This is one of my biggest issues. Of course, I’m not aware of any other scriptwriting software that handles it either.

I’ve now written more than 6 episodes (300+ pages) in Causality and have developed some habits. Not necessarily good habits.

I track storylines (aka plots) with vertical separation.

Initially I used lanes for that, but Per convinced me to use blocks. So, if there are three storylines, there are three “rows” (horizontal blocks across) the whiteboard.

I track characters by color.

Here I mean primary characters. For example, protagonist is blue, antagonist is red, mentor is yellow, love interest is pink, henchman is green, etc. When a beat includes multiple characters, I select a primary and use that color. Not perfect, but works okay.

Typically, the storylines follow a specific character. So, most of that storyline will tend to be the same color, but there are exceptions when other characters get pulled into that storyline.

With this arrangement, I can view the general structure of an episode fairly well, and I can distribute action (plot) in “causal order” fairly well.

And, the most excellent feature of Causality is that I can slide beats between episodes. This happens frequently when writing TV series.

I stopped using tags because I found they either duplicated plot or duplicated character. So, there was no point in my case. I’m probably using them wrong.

Something else I’ve noticed over time: in my world, scenes = beats.

Meaning… out of 300 pages of script, very few scenes are composed of multiple “causality beats.” Maybe this is due to these being TV centric. Although, last month I wrote a movie (now in preproduction, yeah!) and it followed the same pattern.

I guess I’m just a simple writer! I keep a huge file of “potential beats” in Google Docs. But, as they get pulled into scenes, they don’t remain as separate beats.