These last couple of days have felt a bit strange to be honest. Last week I was more or less focused on helping with more organisational activities but over the weekend I have started to focus on my last set of updates on the script.
I found it strange because I believe that it takes a different mindset to approach the problems. My head is still in the lets get things ticked off the list state of being and not the creative state where you need to let your mind wander or dream in order to come up with the best answers to the remaining questions that the script is posing.
Because I was in more of a list ticking frame of mind I decided to do a couple of script based things that I had been meaning to do for a while. One was to move the script from Word into Final Draft. I had heard on a Chris Jones Podcast about a similar story where a 90 page script was only about 70 pages or so within Final Draft compared to word and this scared me a bit so I wanted to do a similar exercise.
My page count did differ from 95 pages in word to 88 pages in Final Draft so I think it was a really worthwhile exercise. Final Draft also has some neat reports that you can run as well. I like the sound of the character report as you can see a summary of all of the dialogue spoken by one character. I am planning to use this to sharpen up some of my dialogue as there is a few places in the script where I feel that things get a bit functional but it is hard to spot whereas I am hoping that looking at the dialogue of a single character at a time might help to identify these things.
The other thing I did was to make lots of small dialogue changes that I had been marking on a now very worn version of the script. I have about four main changes I still want to do but I am going to hold those off till I am in the right zone to make the changes.
The last part of these changes was to split some scenes so that the overall script can be scheduled easier. I keep finding these but scenes that should really be split into two locations but they really are one. Hopefully I have them all caught now.
I will let you know when the creative juices really start flowing or maybe I won't as I will be caught up in the many possibilities in the script!