screen writing software

Ruth came back talking about a friend who wants to get on writing her novel and that got me to thinking about software for narative writing.

I have a look at a number of screen writing apps and found them quite interesting. I was thinking about how similar novel/script writing is to thesis writing - you have to keep a lot in your head. You have to keep notes and keeping non physical notes help.

1. The key feature is outlining. 
1. This highly top down approach strikes me as a bit odd in an industry which regards its self as creative. I think this top down only approach reminds me more of software engineering than unlimited creative 
2. The most important feature is export format
1. looks to be key, again you would think that getting the format output would be the least of the problems but no it looks to be what people mostly use the software for. 
3. Many have a card sorting section 
1. this is just a 2d version of the outlining
4. Most of the apps have some kind of library/reference section to hold additional material  
5. Most apps help you keep track of words used. 

Some of the apps have interesting additions

• Moive Outline has a number of interesting additions 
• Feeling factors a graph showing some aspect ( action, conflict, tension ) and how it changes over a section 
• A character section which tracks the personal arc on a scene by scene basis 
• using four questions 
• what does x need in this step 
• what does x get from this step 
• what conflict or dilemma  does X face in this step 
• how does this step move X's story forward. 
• a profile section which has a number of questions and an interview zone
• A relationships which plots the relationships ( by time I'm not sure)
• A todo list - This I've see this in netbeans and eclipse 
• Spotlight - which pulls all the dialog of X together so you can check the phrase of voice. 
• Scrivener is a mac program which handles the outliner stuff
• Has a nice way of working with fragments you can then reoganise   
• Nice snap shot mode. 
• Fullscreen mode 
• I wonder how many programs ( pages, and now scrivener ) have this full screen mode for when your concentrating on something. 

My problem is that with this software we still get strangely awkward plot lines - Tomb Raider, Sky Captain being my favourites.

Things I would like to see 

1. Something to help you generate people - suggest names, identities, back ground plots possibly lots of stock pictures to help form a mental image.
2. Something to help generate locations 
1. either cities, landscapes, rooms, feelings  
3. Something to interupt the casual flow of the plot 
1. perhaps the machine automatically adds in cards into the script which challenge the writer to throw away some thing. Perhaps the machine adds in things like 'the protagonist is a woman' or 'Incorporate river into the plot' or 'your hero is guilty'. Perhaps you see an evocative picture of something - a large tree. See the very excellent trvropes 
4. Something to help with language 
1. perhaps substitutes words or has some notion of the kinds of language a person might use. Perhaps has a dictionary for each person which limits the words they might know
2. I like the notion of having access to a good dictionary of similar words - pages and Word do this well enough. 
5. I guess what I might be looking for is the textual equivalent of the photo shop filter. You apply a filter to the narrative and the machine alters it in some random way and you evaluate it looking for inspiration. 

1. Storyworld  works quite nicely ( but its paper )  it has Propp like characters/events 
6. Character renaming - so if you change something like name/sex/nationality the software can go through substituting requires a link to the original charater rather than text.
7. Narrative arc - 
1. This for me would be a visualisation which lets you see each character and how they interact in each scene. 
2. A large character by character time line
3. Like a visual Vladimir Propp
4. The idea is to look for inconstancies in the plot 
8. Reading age check - for children's novels guesses the reading age 
9. A synomyn check - looks for and underlines words which are spelt correctly and sound the same as the real world 
10. A text to speech facility like Narrator which lets you listen to your dialog with two ( or more ) voices which lets you test your dialog out.
11. Lots of ways to look at things in new ways. Similar to the feeling facors in plot above. 
1. For example have lots of diffrent types of paper/fonts and get a notbook printed out look. 
2. 
   

All in all it makes you wonder what they do to come up with a plot for a visual effects intensive film. The highly non visual elements of the software makes you wonder. 

re-reading this I'm starting to wonder if this has anything to do with the inability to see the narrative in details for the the child protection people ( from A previous post ).  Also how we can track narrative while looking through large amounts of forensic document data ( I problem I've heard about and blogged about before too ) How can we best illustrate over all narrative in addition to text ? 

Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan on CBC in 1968

One of my interests is how/if we are made by technology how does it change our view of the world and our selves. I've been watching these and enjoying them immensly.
Interesting the notion of the pre/post TV generation which has resonances with the pre/post Internet generation ( I've heard them called digital natives).
Lovely to see prime time television from a point when people can say Faustian or Existential.


Violence is the search for identity.






McLuhan 'to select is to distort' so quote-alisious.
'All science and technologies are extensions of our own bodies' is another apt one.

New Table

This time it runs on a Mac ( nice) . Bendy, makes you wonder what kind of projector they are using.

Lovely bit of work but the plasma/lcd based ones are coming along so well I think we will not be seeing these for long.

Guzumped

A couple of years ago ( really was it that long ?) I worked on trying to unpick the signals from Diamond touch and then spot both fingers. Well I wrote a simple version and got about 80% success rate from it - not bad. I wrote it up but the paper got rejected ( mostly due to poor success rate )

I've thought of a better mechanism one that would handle multiple fingers ( more than two ) but the implement is quite difficult and with the cloud and the table I've never had enough time to really sit down and spend the 5 days it would take to redo.

Well in the mean time someone had managed to do something and get it published! Impressive the paper reads really like the one I wrote but this one managed to get published and it had an 80% success rate.

I'm not that miffed - I had got distracted on other things. But I did feel it was more fundermental - makes implementing 2*1D tables very possible.

I'm more irritated with my self someone else managed to do a multiple mice paper - which was technically much easier but I never managed to think of the useage case ( again side tracked on the table + cloud).

Simon Holland on Direct combination

Its a principle

From a pervasive point of view.

Lots of tiny devices ( ipod/mobile phone).
 Get devices to talk to each other - from an HCI point of view.
Lots of versions of software. Diffrent software

Resource-poor user interfaces
   - Small screens
Minimal attention situations
  - Walking

Standardising protocols - problems with combinatorial explosion.

Principle of direct combination 1999

Use two objects to list common subsets of actions that can be used on them both.
Traditional user interface begins with objects and versbs click on X then select action Y.
User selects N objects - you see list of actions common.

Expand selection out to include remote selection ( say via interface )

Not objects but roles -( is a role like an interface ?)

nasa tlx workload scale
nasa tlx task load scale


previous work


Pick and drop Rekimoto - speical case of DC
InfoStick Kohtake
DataTies Rekimoto

Genius

Just watching Horizon on the BBC. Its a program about genius and it makes me wonder if there is anything you could do with software to make everyone a genius. Perhaps I sound a bit too much like the bad guy from the Incredibles but its a nice idea.
One theory for creative genious was that people's minds spend most of the time 'filtering out irrelevant stimuli' Genii apparently allow the stimuli in but and use it creatively but remain focused on the objective in hand.

How about a word processor that adds in random bits of text while your typing. Perhaps adding in lost of descriptive terms while you type.

Just tried to edit my intranet web page again

Failed dismally.

I do have much more important tasks to get on with. I could spend all day getting technical support but I'm inclined not to as I would loose control of my time ( which I should  really spend on Teaching).

I tried to access Penelope (server) but it was not available. Strange how Apples IDisk and Drop box work so much better than the internal file OU sever ( which should be so much better and is so much more expensive).

More cool stuff to check out

More inspiration for information architecture pieces 

Collage City By Colin Rowe

Digital ground

http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/642611.642652 Design-oriented human-computer interaction

Families and Sense of Community

**** Augmenting refrigerator magnets: why less is sometimes more http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1182475.1182488 


***Promoting awareness of work activities through peripheral displays http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/506443.506527




**HomeNote: supporting situated messaging in the home http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1180875.1180933


Far too many things on my mind.
The whereabouts clock: early testing of a situated awareness device
  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1125451.1125694


Keywords I like virtual presence and fostering a sense of group belonging. 


***Busy families' awareness needs     10.1016/j.ijhcs.2008.09.006


Resilience in the face of innovation: Household trials with BubbleBoard doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2008.07.008


**Homes that make us smart 10.1007/s00779-006-0076-5


Desiring to be in touch in a changing communications landscape: attitudes of older adults http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1518701.1518962


Nice A comparison of reading paper and on-line documents  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/258549.258787


The iterative design and study of a large display for shared and sociable spaces
10.1007/s00779-009-0242-7

Not DIST but ubicomp

Paul is back. Had a meeting with Y and R
Looks like we are thinking this is too good a paper for dist. The big observational results make paper worthy of bigger conf. Will work on weekend and meet Monday morning for go/ no go

Good result

I have been processing the log data from the experiments. Looking closely at the data for the front sensor I found a statistically significant differance between before and after the cloud installation.

While most of the result is qualatively based I do fond the log file resul very gratifying.
Cloud off tomorrow for learn about fair.

Sheep

tangibles tangibles

We talked about using mini projectors in the environment. 

http://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potential_of_sixthsense_technology.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

Colour tracking is a bit cheap ( very simple to do ) but the HCI is good. 

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_merrill_demos_siftables_the_smart_blocks.html

is good inspiration for something you could do with tangibles on the MS table. 

sheep

Nifty Tabletop presentation.

Hi - I'm now involved with this podcasting experiment an while doing so I came across this presentation. Quite nice - love to know what was being said. Interactive Tables And Displays, Ubiquitous Computing Lynn Marentette March 26, 2007

View more presentations from Lynn Marentette.

Everything becomes multi touch.

Thin film you can put on anything, Looks like we could turn the plasma screen into a table too. 

But why stop there, why not an ordinary table or a window.

http://www.displax.com/index.php#/en/products/skin.html

A new large-format multi-touch technology launched today by DISPLAX, a developer of interactive technologies, will transform any non-conductive flat or curved surface into a multitouch screen.

 

The DISPLAX Multitouch Technology, believed to be the first of its kind, has been developed based on a transparent thinner-than-paper polymer film. When applied to glass, plastic or wood, the surface becomes interactive. Significantly, this new multitouch technology can be applied to standard LCD screens as well, making it an attractive choice for LCD manufacturers. The new technology will also be available for audiovisual integrators or gaming platforms to develop innovative products.

Also 

http://www.sourcetech.co.uk/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=746&products_id=2982&gclid=CL3WwNGz1p8CFZEA4wodE3apcw

G2 Multi-Touch Plasma/LCD Overlay (5-Touch)

Starting at: £1,899.00 Ex VAT
£2,231.33 Inc VAT

Idea of the day

I was just putting the lambs to bed when I had an idea of something to do with a Wii controller. I found a way to hack into them but I wanted to think of some kind of creative thing you could do with them.

I wondered if it would be nice to get the wii controller to become a puppet interface. The position of the vertical controller controls the head and the position of the nun-chunk ( the other bit) becomes the controller of the arm - you end up with a muppet ( one controls the head and one arm ).

Using come body dynamics ( attach the body to the head and let it follow the head and arm ) via a physics simulation you could build a simple interface.

Perhaps this could be an interface which lets you record and play back so you can control many characters or perhaps you could have an interface where you are connecting to other people over the internet and you have a kind of strange Skype theatre.