How to Breakdown a Script with EP Scheduling

Video Transcript

"Hi Chris Cobb for Expert Village welcome back. So we just set up our preferences in EP Scheduling and we are almost ready to break down the script. The first thing we have to figure out is how we are going to break it down. There's a couple of different methods we can use. First one is to use the old school method and is to take some highlighters here I have five different colors and that's I think a minimum that you should use and assign them to categories in the script. So for instance, I would assign orange to cast and blue to background extras and pink to props and vehicles and green towards hair, make up, and wardrobe and so on and so forth. Then I would go through the script and on every page in each scene I would look for those elements and I would mark them up with the highlighters. The second way that I can do it is I can actually do that exact same thing on the computer. So if I saved my script as a pdf file then I opened it up in a program like pdf pen that's the one that I use pdf pen. I can go through and I can highlight it exactly as if I was using markers except that I'm doing it on the computer and finally you can also use one the major screen writing software it?s out there to tag your script. So for instance, final graft final draft has a program that's called Final Draft Tagger and you go through it's just like using markers. Your marking them up in colors as you go through the script. You can use you can also use Movie Magic Screen Writer and go through and tag it as well and what the tagging allows you to do is actually export the tagged elements of the script and then import it directly into EP scheduling. It's faster. It has it's own hiccups we'll learn those a little bit later but for now what I am going to do is I am actually going to use the computer to tag it as if I was using markers and that way anybody out there that might be using markers you'll get a you'll know exactly what you need to do and anybody out there that's tagging you'll also know exactly what to do and that way we will not leave anyone out as we learn how to break down our script. Ok? So let's get started."