I Actually Did A Little Work on "The Barrier" This Week

I've procrastinated on "The Barrier", my transportation planning movie, for a long time. This week I actually did something.

I began to prepare a new version of the script that conforms to the movie as it currently stands. Once I have a baseline script, I can start to decide what changes I want to make.

I found an old version of the script that I created from the Xtranormal STATE files. It was a LibreOffice file and when I opened it, nothing showed. It turned out that the styles I'd set up for the script format had gotten deleted somehow. I managed to convert the file to MS Word and was able to fix it there.

According to my notes, after I created this script, I made some more changes to the STATE files before I created the video that I used in the movie. I might have cut some lines out when I did the edit. I don't remember for sure, so it is better to assume that I did. In 2014 I replaced the first scene. The original version had no dialogue, but thee new one did.

I tried to run the conversion program I created to turn the STATE file into the script format, but that didn't work. Rather than try to fix the conversion program, I just edited the STATE file and extracted the dialogue I wanted. I added that to the old script.

One of the limitations of my conversion is that it can't convert the actions into description. A few scenes had no dialogue, and so consisted solely of the slug line. I began to work my way through the script to add in the actions. I got through about 12 scenes, out of 60 scenes in total.

I wanted to check my script against the dialogue in the current version of the movie. My original plan was to play the movie and read the script along with the audio. I remembered that I had created a caption file for YouTube, and I realized I could use that instead. I haven't started on that yet. It may be a better idea to play the movie and use that instead of the caption file. It might help me identify changes to make.

It looks like this could be a long slow process.

Note: the current version of "The Barrier", version 0.6, can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATcKnFAwlU0

I would like it if you could watch it and tell me what you think.

This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog