Hey Episode Creators!
Today we’re releasing a bunch of new tools to help you work more efficiently on your story!
When we went to add some of these new tools we realized that our directing helpers were pretty messy, confusing and didn’t leave a lot of space for the new things we wanted to add…
So we set out to do some cleanup and reorganized our tools to make them more clear and most importantly pave the way for awesome new tools!
…like our brand new layering helpers!
Gone are the days of editing layers in the script editor and updating your story! You can now edit the layer of any character or overlay easily with only the directing helpers.
Easily move things forward or backward by a single layer or send them straight to the front or back.
We also know that working with the spot directing coordinates and zones can be pretty confusing and many of you have been asking us to help make that easier for a while now.
While we can’t make any adjustments to the way the tech works because it would break stories, we still wanted to help make this easier to use. So we focused on what we can change, the debug text.
Before, it was hard to tell where a character or overlay if they were in a zone since the numbers would change based on if a zone was set or not. But we didn’t show what zone you were in! So we’ve added the zone to always show.
This will also update when you drag characters or overlays into new zones or out of the zones completely.
You will only see negative numbers or numbers larger than 320 if you go out of the zone boundaries. So you will see negative numbers if a character or overlay is to the left of zone 1 and the only time you will see numbers greater than 320 will be if they are to the right of zone 3.
One of our super awesome engineers also created this chart to help make it clear where these zone boundaries are:
Check it out in action here:
Anything that is output here is also now exactly what you need to put into your script to place the character in that spot! No math required!
And the best part? All of these updates are now live in the app AND on the web previewer!!
Happy Writing!
Love,
The Episode Team
UPDATE: These have been officially released! There is a small bug currently, described below:
If your characters are not spot directed onto layers in the Donacode, like in the example below:
INT. CEO OFFICE - DAY
@LIZ spot 1.280 120 80 AND LIZ faces right
@MELANI3 spot 1.280 200 80 AND MELANI3 faces left
the Bring to Front/Send to Back buttons will not work as intended.
However, the Forward and Backward Layer tools will! Our team is working on removing this issue in future versions.