Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Micah Craddy. I'm going to show you how ArcStudio's Plotboard makes outlining your stories easier, so you can go from idea to completed script with minimal stress. And since stress is bad for your heart, there may be health benefits too. What is the Plotboard, I ask myself, for the sake of a transition? It is ArcStudio's digital whiteboard used to break stories. And it's also what you're looking at right now. This is the Plotboard, and of course you'll notice there's information on it. This is a fake movie that I have partially broken and invented for this tutorial. It's called Toby the Talking Tennis Ball. It's kind of a family movie with some thriller elements about a tennis ball that comes to life after it's used to hit a magical shot in Wimbledon. The shot's so magical to win the championship that the ball comes to life. The Wimbledon champion is afraid that if people find out the ball came to life, they're going to think she only won because it was a magic ball, so she tries to kill the tennis ball. The tennis ball escapes and goes on this journey of self-discovery. So it's also a coming-of-age tale, I guess. It's not fully broken, because fully breaking a fake script would be insane. But what you can see is the story here is arranged in acts with different story beats. So each column here represents an act or part of an act. So Act 1, Act 2a, Act 2b, Act 3. And of course you can edit it. I can do Act 1 there, or I could, you know, say the intro. I could, you know, label it by sections instead. Whatever you want to do. These are drag-and-drop, so you can rearrange your script if you want to. And of course you can add acts just by clicking Add Act, and you can delete the act just by clicking Remove Act Break. You'll notice when you remove the act break, the beat in the act doesn't disappear, because, you know, just because you're getting rid of an act break doesn't mean you want to get rid of all the beats. There are a few different ways you can add beats. You can just click the plus sign by the act name, and this will add a beat at the end of an act. You can also click on a beat, and then click Add Beat, and it'll add a beat below it. You can also click on a beat and then do Shift Return, and it'll add a beat below it. And if you want to get rid of a beat, you right-click on it, and you either click Remove Script Section or Remove Beat Keep Script Section. So the reason it doesn't just say Delete Beat is we'll get into later. The beats on your plotboard and the portion of your script that is that beat are linked. So the beat on the plotboard and the script section are linked, which gives you some cool benefits we'll talk about later. But basically, when you're deleting a beat, you either can choose to delete both the beat and the script section, or just the beat and keep the script section. So I'm just going to do Remove Script Section like that. So the beats are organized. They each have a title up here, and they have the information, the description of the beat in them. You can click on them. You can also navigate by hitting Tab. If you're here, hit Tab. Now you're in the description section. So as you're building your story, primarily you are going to be putting beats on the board, filling them with information and arranging them in the structure that you want. We can also add comments by either clicking the comment or by clicking Command Option M. And you can write a comment like Great Beat and comment on the script. And you can reply to comments. So that's great. If you're working with collaborators, you can comment and reply to comments and give feedback on the beats. Now, sometimes you may have a beat, but not know where it goes in your story. It could be a new beat that you're just thinking of, and you don't know where to put it. Or maybe there's something in your story, and you're like, Oh, I still like this, but I don't know where to put it. And that's where the Beat Inbox comes in handy. And that's a place to temporarily park your beats. And that's in the left sidebar here. In Contents, click Inbox. And this is your Beat Inbox. So you can directly create a beat here by just clicking this plus, or you can drag a beat from your plot board into the Inbox. And then when you figure it out, you can drag it back on just like that. The drag and drop feature isn't limited to just the Beat Inbox. You can drag and drop beats all over your plot board. You can move it between acts like that. You can hit Command Z to put it back where it was. You can move it earlier in an act, later in an act, whatever you want to do. You also might want to move your beats as a sequence, because sometimes it's their beats go together, right? So for instance, I have this sequence here. Toby is chased through Parliament. There's a boast chase on the Thames River. Toby gets caught. This is all kind of a chase sequence. So I can right-click on this beat and click Make Beginning of Sequence. And then I can name the sequence Chase Sequence. And now this will move as a group. If you have a beat at the bottom of the sequence that you don't want to be part of it, you can just right-click on the beat you don't want to be part of it and click Make Beginning of Sequence. And now this will separate it from the sequence above it. Your story isn't just a list of plot points. It consists of your characters, the themes, the storylines, where everything takes place, and much more. So to help you with that, we have the story elements. These beats are tagged with certain story elements. The color bars on the left tells you which storylines they're tagged with. The colored circles tell you which characters they're tagged with. And all the information is located in the story elements sidebar. So in the right sidebar, pin it open, click Elements, and you'll see Storylines, Characters, and Locations. So I can just toggle this open here, and we'll see the storylines here. Toby searches for his place in the world. Donnie tries to win his son's love, and Freya tries to protect her legacy. Apologies for the mispronunciation of Freya. If I click on it, I expand it, and you'll notice that it looks a lot like a beat. It has a title. I can write a description if I wanted, and I can also change the color. So right now, it's purple for his storyline, but let's say I wanted to make it green. Now you'll notice all those change to green. And to add a storyline, you just click the plus there and you can add another storyline. Characters work the same, basically. So I have Toby the tennis ball, Donnie Dixon, Freya Bjork, and Mr. X. He's the evil private eye who's hunting down Toby. You can open them, write a description. You can also choose whether they're gendered. So I can make my tennis ball a male or a female, and I can give him an image. So Toby the tennis ball, I can take a reference image and drag it here and drop it, and boom, I have a little image here for my character, Toby the tennis ball. To delete it, I can just click this trash can, but I'm going to leave it there. And now you'll see, look, there's a little tennis ball there for Toby, and that's on the beats that he's tagged with as well. And again, to add another character, you just hit the plus arrow, and they're there. To delete the elements, you can just click remove character, but you can also do this, add script name. So if I do that, it'll automatically put in the full name, but this is the name in the script as you're writing. And I don't want to say Toby the tennis ball every time. I just want to say Toby. So I can just change it to Toby, and now Toby is part of the auto completer when I'm doing the dialogue and the characters. It'll just say Toby, and I can do that for the rest of my characters as well. Donnie Dixon can just become Donnie. And you'll notice, yeah, they all have the same functionality. And then there is the locations, which are also similar. You can write the title, a description, you can add photos, the same, but you can also change whether they're an interior or an exterior. So Wimbledon Stadium right now, I have an exterior, but I could change it to an interior. The reason you can change between interior or exterior is that once you tag a beat with a location, when you're writing that beat in the script, the auto completer will give you the suggestion. So for instance, my first beat I've tagged with Wimbledon Stadium. So when I'm writing that beat in the script, the auto completer for the scene heading will give me exterior Wimbledon Stadium as an option while I'm writing it. For characters and locations, you can also import from scripts. So if you've started writing your script already, you can import a location. So for instance, in this script, I have Parliament as location. So I can just click there and Parliament will automatically be created as a location. And now when I tag, for instance, Toby is chased through Parliament with the Parliament location, the auto completer will give me that as an option. Okay, so let's talk about tagging beats. I've already kind of shown you, but let's do the hashtag. You can click it and you can either use your arrows to go through and use your right arrow to select, left arrow to unselect, or you can just click and unclick. And obviously you can tag each beat with more than one thing. Because there may be more than one character, there may be more than one storyline, it could even be multiple locations perhaps. The color tagging of the beats lets you get a visual overview of your story at a glance. You can see which storylines are being serviced by which beats, which characters are in which parts of your script. But it also lets you sort things. So you can come down here to the filter beats and choose a storyline, for instance, a story element, and everything that has this storyline will be highlighted or everything that has this character will be highlighted. Or you can even do everything that's at a certain location like Wimbledon Stadium. Or you could even search for multiple elements at once and see what has all of them. You can also down here highlight key beats. So if there's a pivotal beat, you know, for instance, like Freya tries to kill Toby, I can mark it as a key beat. And then once I highlight all my key beats, everything I've marked as a key beat will be highlighted. While we're down here at the bottom, we can also open all of our beats and close all our beats. And last, we can use ArcView, which is a way to basically see the highs and lows of your story. So for instance, I can double click on this, select a storyline like Toby searches for his place where all he comes to life, that's pretty good. But then Freya tries to kill Toby. So double click here, click that one, and that's pretty bad. So he's going to drop down low, he escapes again, so it's going to go higher. And you can do that for all the storylines and really track whatever value you want to on the ArcView. I want to briefly show you what the plotboard looks like when you first get to it. So when you first navigate to the plotboard, you'll see this start your beat outline screen. And you'll see this screen whenever the plotboard is empty. And you have two options, you can either just click add first beat, and you'll get one act with one beat. And you can start from there and build your story. Or and I just hit Command Z to get back to the screen, you can choose a beat template. So these six ones at the bottom are automatically included with ArcStudio. And these are ones I've come up with on myself, lame, not so great, awesome templates, just example templates I've come up with. So if I click on this, for instance, like, you know, Syd Field's Paradigm, I'm going to get basically a pre populated scaffolding to write a movie. You'll notice it has all the acts in and it has the structure elements. So inciting incident, opening scene, midpoint, pinch to all these, you know, structural elements of a story to help you write, should you choose to use them. If you add a title to the beat, so for the inciting incident, I could see like the assassination, the inciting incidents stays here, the structural stays here. And of course, it can also be edited. And if you create a new beat, and you give it a title, like, I don't know, action sequence or something. Once it has a title, you can right click on it and click Add Structural Role and add, you know, whatever was surprise, that's where a surprise is going to happen. So you can customize the template, you know, any way you want. And then once you've made a template that you like, if you want to use it again, you're like, okay, I'm gonna use this structure again to write an episode of something or to write another movie, or I want to share this template with other people because I found it very helpful. You can just click Create Template down here at the bottom and give it a name like Micah's Rockin' Template. Click OK. And now next time, you know, I go to that blank, you know, start your beat outline screen Micah's Rockin' Template will be waiting for me. When you create templates, it doesn't include the description like this. This won't be in there, the title, the assassination won't be there. It'll be the acts, the number of beats and the structure role. So everything that it started with when I first showed you this, that's what will be in the template. At some point, you're going to need to see your story in, you know, page form. You want to read it top to bottom, left to right, like our English loving brains have been taught to do. And that's where the outline view comes in handy. So you can get there by just clicking outline at the top or doing command option, right arrow. And this is how you can cycle through all the views as well. And here we are in outline view. You'll see all our beats are here because these are all the beats from the plot board. They have the titles, they have the descriptions, they have the storylines and the characters that they've been tagged with. And you can read through this here, but you can also edit your story. You can edit the titles, you can drag and drop everything by clicking the bar on the left here, and then you can drag it to there. You can drag it back. Yeah, everything can be edited. You can tag and untag things here as well. But primarily, I think this is just great for reviewing your story, reading through it, really seeing how it flows, seeing what it needs in the outline view. And of course, you can also export outlines. If you go up here to the export menu, click export, choose outline. You can either export it as a text document or as a PDF. And here are all the options for what you want included in the outline. So you could have it tagged with the colors or not. You could have it be very simple. You could have all your storylines and characters and locations listed. And you click these little carrots here to get more details for what you want to have included or not included. And then just click export outline and choose where you want it to be. Now it's time for the main event. We've broken our story. We've written our outline. We are ready to write our script. So of course, we're going to go to the script view, which you can either just click on script here at the top or use the keyboard shortcut to toggle over with command option arrow. And here we are in the script view. Now you'll notice we're kind of skipping past the tyranny of the blank page because the page isn't blank. These are all of our beats, right? So we already have the scaffolding of the script waiting for us. But even better, we have all the information from the beats at our fingertips too. You don't have to keep going back and forth to the plot board being like, okay, wait, what was in this beat? And then go back to the script and then go back to the plot board, back to the script. Instead, you can just open up the sidebar and we're at the beat inbox right now. We're going to go away from that and boom, here we have all of our beats listed in order. And not only do we have all of them, but we have all the information they contain. So we can just double click on the beat. We have the title, we have the description, we have the characters, we have the locations it's been tagged with, we have the storyline it's been tagged with. We could even have the details of the storyline. If we've written more notes here, we can even have the character details that we've written. It's all right at our fingertips. And this makes writing just so seamless because you don't have to click away to other apps, to other parts of your script or anything. Everything is just right here. So you just write your script and have the information here. So again, we have access to all of our beats. We can open them by double clicking. You can also open them by clicking this little beat marker here next to the beat information, the beat prompt, and close it like that. So how do we proceed? How do we write our script? Well, you just click here. So our first beat is Wimbledon Final, right? That was the first beat from our plot board. So I can click here and boom, exterior Wimbledon Stadium. It is already pre-populated that for me because I tagged this beat with that location. So I just click it, day, and boom, I'm writing my scene. And now I can write, you know, whatever I want. You know, it's a hot and windy day. I have no idea when Wimbledon is or what the weather would be like at that time. But whatever you do, your description, you know, you write your characters. Freya is grunting because I think that's like what tennis players do as they hit the ball. Freya hits the ball with alacrity. I don't know if that makes sense at all, but it's fun. And as I've done this, I've linked the beat and the scene. So you'll see here that they're next to each other. But if I come to the plot board, I could then move this beat, say, like move it down to there. And if I go to the script, it's moved. So when it's time to edit your script to change things, it's really easy to rearrange things by just dragging and dropping the beats around. And then the linked sections of the script will also move. It also, the linkage lets you do one other cool thing, which is this little link button right here. If I click it, it'll automatically take me to that part of the script. So if it's page one, right, it's not super helpful. But what if it's one of these beats deep in the script? I can just click on the link and it'll take me, you know, directly to the scene on page 60 or whatever it is. So it's a really nice way to navigate through your script. In the content sidebar, you can also look at the scenes instead of the beats if you want. So for instance, here, I've toggled to hide the beats and show the scenes. And I've only written one scene heading. So that's why there's only one here. But these were all the scenes that I will be writing for the beats. And then again, I can just show the beat. I can also show previews if I want to see the beat and the scene heading. If you want to learn more about how you can link your scenes and beats together, you can check that out in the Help Center in the guide on our website. There will be a link in the description below. Alright, that's it for now. I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial and I hope you've enjoyed the story of Toby the Talking Tennis Ball. Just want you to know that it does have a happy ending. He finds a home with a family that has a dog with no teeth so he can play fetch with but won't get hurt by the dog's teeth. And Freya, the tennis player who was trying to kill him, realizes that because she brought Toby to life, it means she really did amazing. So his existence isn't a threat to her but just a testament to her greatness. And Donnie Dixon reconciles with his son and realizes that his son loves him just for being who he is. So really just smiles and joy all around. Okay, until next time, happy writing.