Adding comments to scripts

If you are a co-author or a reviewer, you can add comments to a script; if you're a reader, you cannot. So comments are an important part of the whole collaborative process, and let me show you how that works. You have the Script open here inside Story Plus. I'm going to add a comment to it. Now you can add a comment on Story Free or Story Plus, going back and forth. So you're not limited to just adding comments in Story Plus. You add comments at to the end of lines. Any line ending can have a comment on it. You just click somewhere, and you notice you get that little speech balloon there, over here you get a speech balloon, wherever you click at the end of the line, even if it's over here, you get that a little speech balloon at the end of the line.

So you click on that to add a new comment. That's kind of off to the side, so I'll scroll over there a little bit. I'll say something like How about mid-day instead of sunset? Like that, how about midday? And I click away to accept it. If I press Enter, it just adds another line to it, so I click away to accept that. And now it says I am Editing because it's what I am doing right now, so the other guy the Collaborator cannot edit while I do this. If I click Save Now, that will add that comment to the Document, so I'll click Save Now.

I'm still editing for a moment but when it's finally finished this saving, it's going to switch over the View here to say we have two guys working on this at the same time. And now I can go to the other view I have inside my Browser and Story Free, and there it is, and there is that comment I just added. It's as if we're looking at the same document, but, in fact, it's a completely different view here inside the Story Free Version instead of the Story Plus Version. You can tell it says Free up there, and it's not. So now I'm going to respond to this now and say OK, let me hover to the end of this line here, click on that.

Notice it's a different color, and I'll say Perhaps evening? Click away to accept that, and now I'm going to say Save Now, wait for this to change, say that it's done Saving and here we go, and now we go back to desktop Story Plus Application. Here we go. And again, there is that comment, looks good. Now to search on comments or re-arrange them or just check them all out, you can look in the Comments panel. And if you notice on the left, there's this lovely little panel here, the outline of the entire script. If you click on this, it takes you to scene:1, scene:2, et cetera, and you can see the text there.

Notice these little dots here. They indicate the characters that are there. Most common characters, the first one, let me close that down again by clicking again. Here we go. Click again and close it down, and here we go. And these little dots represent the characters, and the most popular ones and on the left-hand side there's JOSEPH and then Mr. DALTON. You can see those characters there. Here we go. Then over the right-hand side, there is this similar panel, click on this. It has three tabs, SCENE PROPERTIES tells you a little bit about each of the scenes. I'll click through here, and we go from one scene to the next, and you may wonder why there is no SCENE number here.

If there are no SCENE numbers here, either you need to turn on scene numbers to see them there. So I'm going to over to View > Scene > Numbering, there is Numbering > Scene ,like that, Numbering Scene, click that, and that turns on Scene Numbers here, and there we go. You can go through one at a time. As you go through, you'll see what characters are in there. If I go back--let's say--SCENE 5. There it says there aren't CHARACTERS, but you open this up, click on look for NON SPAEAKING CHARACTERS, and it finds that Joseph NS in there as Non-Speaking, an NS Character, okay? That's how that works.

Let's switch over to the COMMENTS View. See there are two comments. Click on that. There are those two comments. I can Sort on the Comments or search on the comments. I can say instead of in this order, I say Sort by Time instead of by Page Orders, so when they were added, let's rearrange them a bit. And then I can delete them here, if I want to. If I hover over one of them, there is a little delete thing there. Click on that to get rid of it. I have got rid of it here, so I want to click Save now. I want to go back to the other document, the Story Free inside my Browser in just a moment when this is done saving and see how that looks.

We'll see that comment is gone now, and you can't delete comments inside the Free Version that are made by other people, not just comments that you make. So it's not like you're stuck inside Story Free to only deal with your own comments, not others, but we are going to delete this one which actually was made on the side. Nevertheless, it's easy to leave in here as well. I'll Save that now. Then I can go back to the Desktop Application, and those comments are gone. Here we go, all are gone. Close this guy back again there. Give us some more real estate. So that's how you can add Comments, how you can Sort them, look through them Inside the Comments panel, and then delete them.