With Goalscape, you lay out your tasks, project elements, or whatever, in a circle. Traditionally, the size of each task 'wedge' indicates its importance; however, there is a cute coincidence with a screenwriting Goalscape. A script for a movie is roughly 100 pages long, so a page of my script takes 1% of the way around the Goalscape circle. This shows me right away that, at this stage in my plans, I have far too much in act 2:
A new feature in the latest release of Goalscape lets you filter the chart by tags, due dates, people responsible for the task's accomplishment, or whatever. For the script, I have created a tag for each member of the cast. Katie is a major character, and if I filter the Goalscape to highlight just her scenes, it looks like she gets lost for a while a couple of times.
It is very exciting to see the balance of the script this way, and not have to sort of fumble around while writing and wonder whether I have left Katie offstage for too long.
If you look back in the blog for other Goalscape entries, you will see I used it when learning lines for a production of Titus Andronicus. As I did then, you can register graphically how much of each task is completed, and make sure you can make your deadlines.
I will post a progress report in ten days or so, unless the wheels really fall off the wagon. Really looking forward to April!
4 comments:
Excellent. I stumbled on this post from the Script Frenzy forums. I was intrigued by Goalscape and downloaded the demo. I really like the interface, but I already have some other GTD applications, so I didn't want to add another one into the mix. OmniFocus doesn't look as nice, but at least it does Next Actions. (Incidentally, do you know if Goalscape does that?)
But what I really like about this is your idea of using it to outline an individual script that you're about to write. I think I might buy Goalscape for that purpose alone. You can see the structure at a glance in a nice, visual way as well as see what still needs to be written, make changes as you go, etc. Tagging them for characters etc. is also very useful.
Thanks for the tip! Much appreciated.
One more thing: I notice you have the scenes/sequences set up in different colours. Would you mind my asking what kind of system there is behind this?
Thanks for the nice comments. Goalscape is really helping me write without worrying that I have forgotten something.
For the color scheme, right click on any task in your Goalscape, and you will see a "Color Goal" option. Click that to get a small palette of possible colors, and the option to flow the color change down to the sub-tasks under that task.
Thanks for posting your example - it's helpful to pick up idea that will transfer to another area.
The TAG aspect is proving very useful.
The 'NEXT ACTIONS' would be really useful for what I want to do with Goalscape.
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