Here's my mini-review of Sophocles 2007 Beta. Keep in mind that I'm a newbie. I'm working on my first script using Sophocles. Also, please keep in mind that I had somewhat already "completed" my movie in my mind. I just didn't know the exact sequence of events. So, this may not be useful to those who do not have the "complete picture" of their movie yet.
As one would expect from a script formatting software, it has all sorts of features that make life easier for the user, like auto-complete for example.
In this review, I would like to focus on the Threads and Steps features, which I do not believe the others have. If you're a software developer, think of the movie as a multi-threaded application. The threads in Sophocles are akin to the threads in your application. They run independently but usually in a coordinated manner. The steps are the different things going on in the thread.
For example, in my case, I ended up creating a thread for each important character and relationship. I'm not sure they were meant to be used that way. But that's how I found it useful. In each thread, I enumerated all sorts of actions/scenes/whatever that involve that character/relationship. Obviously, I ended up with duplicate ones since two or more characters can appear in the same scene (and therefore have the same steps). But I didn't care. I just typed away.
Then, once I thought I had covered all the important characters/relationships, it was time to sort the steps, in the order I wanted them to appear in the movie. That was fun, until I realized I was doing it in the wrong tab.
I was doing the sorting in the "Chrono" tab. When I finished, I found that it was useless. I could not create a scene header out of those steps. I had to redo them in the "Step" tab. I'm the type who hates doing things over so you can just imagine how frustrating this was for me. Anyway, good thing Sophocles has a split view so it was easy enough to refer to the Chrono tab whenever I couldn't remember the sequence of steps. (Btw, I believe the Chrono tab is useful for movies that jump around in time too much, like the recent Sandra Bullock starrers "The Lake House" & "Premonition", which I both loved -- I know, I'm in the minority -- , except that the latter's ending could have been better, IMO.)
The Step view is where your steps and your scenes collide. Once you're done sorting the steps there, then it's just a matter of inserting a scene header before a particular step to make that step belong to that scene. Then, that step and everything after it (until the next scene header or the end of the list) become part of the "step checklist" for that scene. You can check each one off as you finish incorporating it into your scene.
The beauty of this paradigm (if you may) is that you can work on the different threads (semi-)independently at first before weaving them together. And they're color coded. So it's easy to see if, let's say, you're showing too much of one thread in certain parts of the movie.
When you define a thread, you can associate it with a certain theme. Sophocles provides predefined ones like unrequited love or mistaken identity, just to name a couple. That tells me that it suggests creating threads according to the themes in your movie. But I ignored that and did it my way. I didn't bother associating my threads with themes.
I guess that's about it. I'll add more to this review if/when I find other interesting features or quirks.
Thanks for reading,
Ever
