Adobe Story has had the ability to tag individual words in a script—either manually or automatically—for a while now. And that was great if the item you want to tag is explicitly mentioned in the script. But what if the thing you need to tag is implied, rather than explicitly called out? Previously, you had to add that item to your script, or wait until later in the process to capture it. With Scene Level Tagging, it’s a breeze.

Another advantage of Story’s new approach to tagging? You can now capture info needed to break down your script right in the script itself, and it all flows effortlessly into your schedule. This makes it easy for one person on a team to break down a script scene by scene while someone else works on the schedule—another way that Story’s collaboration features can help teams work more efficiently.

One other thing worth noting: You can now define your own custom categories for the tags you want to use, rather than slogging through a list of 40+ items (many of which you’d only need for certain genres of content). And  Tag Lists you create can be assigned at a project level, so they’re available for all scripts in the project.

Here’s a quick walkthrough of how the new feature works, to help you get started. Note that you have to be a Story Plus user to see these options—a great reason to upgrade.

In your Project panel, click the Manage Lists button on the toolbar. In addition to managing Character, Set, and Actor lists for your project, you can now create and edit Tag and Tag Item lists.

The Tag list contains the tag categories you want to organize any specific tags into; tag categories for Props, Set Dressing, Make-up, Wardrobe, Vehicles, and Sound Notes would be logical entries here. It’s worth thinking a bit about which categories you want to track, and designing this up front.

The Tag Items list are the things you’re likely to use over and over again, and anything you enter here can be auto-filled as you type, which saves time. Tag items might be things like a marble table lamp, hot pink lipstick, a blue school backpack, a red and white polka dot scarf that’s a character’s signature item. Unlike the Tag List categories, Tag Items can be edited on the fly or added up front; you can also add tags to the scene without including them in the project-level Tag Items list.

Once you’ve created your Tag  and Tag Items lists, assign them to your project. As with all of the other list types, you can assign the same lists to multiple projects.

Open the script you want to tag, then choose View > Tagging Panel to reveal the panel where you’ll apply tags. The top of the panel now has a section called Current Scene Tags, which will be empty when you start. As you add tag items, they’ll appear here grouped by category.
Navigate to the scene you want to tag, and then start adding them items you want to associate for that scene. You can add tags either by click on the Add button next to the Tags listed, or you can click on the Edit button at the top of the panel. In the Add Tags dialog box, select the Tag category you want to add items to, enter text (up to 32 characters per entry), and then click Add. You can open or hide items within a Tag category, and you can move from category to category easily. When you’re done, click Close.

Move to the next scene and break down that scene in the same way.

Because Story covers both screenwriting AND scheduling/production planning, all of the tags you enter here can be viewed in your schedule, and pushed out to some reports.

For example, the new Bible report (requested by a major customer in Ireland) provides a scene-on-a-page summary of your production, which is handy to have on set for everyone involved in a shoot. If you’ve tagged a scene, each Tag category is listed in the left column, and the Tag Items you added for that category are listed on the right—making it easy for wardrobe, makeup and set dressing teams to get prepared and stay organized.

We’re really excited to be delivering this new capability—we think it’ll help your productions go even more smoothly, so you can focus on making in-the-moment creative decisions. 

The big news in this release is a completely revamped approach to tagging that offers a vastly more flexible approach to breaking down a script.

Now, you can tag anything you like in a scene—and your tags flow through to your schedule as well as many of our production reports. This is a huge improvement, as our previous implementation of tagging required the actual words you tagged to be explicitly present in the script. This worked fine for anything that was explicitly mentioned—for example, “SUE DROVE UP IN HER BRAND NEW MINI COOPER”—but didn’t help at all if the items you wanted to tag weren’t mentioned. For example, you could tag “mess” in “CHRIS’ APARTMENT WAS A MESS, BUT JO FOUND A SPOT TO PERCH” but what if you wanted the props department to have stacks of sloppily stacked notebooks and papers, a sinkful of dirty dishes, and a heap of dirty laundry? Well, as of today, you can enter whatever props you want to be associated with a scene. We’ll be posting another blog entry that goes into more detail, but the bottom line is that this is a big leap forward in making Adobe Story a fantastic tool for creating breakdown reports. You can get a sense of how it works in the screenshot to right.

There are loads of other new features too. We’ve added a new Writer role that Story Plus users can assign in shared projects. What? Isn’t Story all about writing? Well, yes and no. Story offers BOTH writing and production scheduling/management tools. In working with some of our large broadcast customers, who use both parts of Story, they’ve asked for a way to keep writers focused on the key task of writing great stories, without having to delve into (or even see) schedules, reports, and the scripts written by other writers working on the project. If you’re a writer working on your own project, you’ll be the project’s owner. If you invite a collaborator to work on the writing with you, assign them the Co-Author role. And if you’re working as a freelance writer on a large production that has built a structure workflow around Adobe Story, don’t be surprised if you’re set up as a Writer.

We’ve also made loads of small improvements across Story, many of which are only relevant if you’re using Story Plus (which as you know is included in a full Creative Cloud membership). Here’s a partial list:

• Clicking on the blue cross to add a character or set to the Character or Set lists associated with a project now opens the relevant list instead of just adding the item; if you’re adding a new set, you’re required to specify whether it’s in a studio or on location.
• You can now manage shot numbers (wait—you didn’t know you could add camera shots to quickly create a shooting script? It’s super cool! Learn more here) with the same flexibility you have for dialogue and scene numbers.
• Speaking of camera shots—you can now create camera cards for just a particular day, as well as for just a particular camera or just studio or location scenes. Or mix and match!
• Thanks to our collaboration with Ireland’s RTÉ, we now have a TV template designed specifically for their productions (called Irish TV Screenplay). This new template format has a number of cool features, and one of the most useful can be turned on for any template: you can choose to have the first Action element of each scene be treated as the scene’s synopsis. If you choose this option, that element automatically populates the Synopsis field in the Scene Properties panel. Why is this handy? Well, then you have a synopsis include in your schedule as well as any reports that support the field—and you don’t have to do a thing.
• We’ve added a whole bunch of new reports as well. My favorite is the Bible, which is a scene by scene summary of a script, including any scene level tags you’ve added. <<screenshot>>
• You can now specify template defaults for whether the From and To boxes at the start and end of each scene now include info about previous and upcoming camera shots. Use the Edit > Template command and choose the option on the General tab.
• When you enter time info for a scene, you can now have that info used for all subsequent scenes in a script.
• We’ve added new options for sorting schedules. You can use the View > Story Order option to temporarily resort a schedule into Story order; when you use this view, options like breaks aren’t available—to use them, just switch back to the Shooting Order view.

We’ve also redesigned the landing age at story.adobe.com to make it more clear that Adobe Story is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, and we’ve added an in-app news feed so we can make sure you get the latest info about Story.

I’m sure I’ve left a few things out—but we sure hope you enjoy this new release. Let us know what you think by adding a comment below.

You can always access the latest release notes right in Story: click on the Home icon, then the Release Notes link on the right edge of the page (see below). Or, access the full Adobe Story Help online.

Why such a big change? We want you to use Story Plus! We think it’s the best possible solution for anyone making media, particularly if you’re working on scripted films, television, and other types of video content. The writing tools in Story are great, but the real power comes from integrating your scripts into a powerful scheduling engine that can also generate extremely useful production reports. Script changes? No problem—all you have to do is synch your schedule, then refresh your reports, which is a lot faster and easier than making all of those changes manually. Story Plus is unique in that it combines screenwriting with scheduling, and we’re finding that once folks start using it, they’re hooked.

Here’s a quick link to the feature comparison page that highlights the differences between Story Free and Story Plus: http://adobe.ly/OSjzlc

If you’re currently a Story Plus subscripter paying for a month-to-month subscription, you don’t need to do anything—we’ll just be charging you less every month going forward.

Did you purchase an annual subscription to Story Plus? We’ve got you covered too. While we will no longer be offering the pay-up-front annual subscription option, any current annual subscriptions will run their course as expected, and you don’t have to take any action at all. And because we appreciate your early vote of confidence in the future of Adobe Story, we’re extending all of the Story Plus annual subscriptions by 6 months at no cost—which means that you’re effectively getting the new lower price for the duration of your subscription.

We’re excited about Story’s bright future, and we’d love to have everyone using Story Free tap into the power of the feature we have in Story Plus. More to follow! And as always, you can create a new Story Free account or log into your account at https://story.adobe.com.

Story Plus is unique in the market in that it combines screenwriting tools with advanced production scheduling. One aspect of this workflow that most people I talk to don’t seem to know about is the fact that you can use Story to very easily create detailed shooting scripts. You can add camera shots to a script using both Story Free and Story Plus, but the feature’s real power is unlocked in Story Plus, where you can create schedules and reports that capture and communicate the shot lists to everyone on the set.

Here’s the workflow in a nutshell: in the script, you can right-click anywhere and add a camera shot. Over and over and over. And for each camera shot, you can add quite a bit of detail, including which camera, the camera’s position, and any notes about camera movements or framing. Here’s what this looks like—I’m using one of our TV templates here, which are designed to accommodate camera shots in the layout—if you use the Film template, your script will get reformatted to make room for these new elements—fair warning!

Once you’re done adding shots, you can see a scene-by-scene list in the Scene Properties panel. Find them visually distracting? Choose View > Camera Shots to turn them off (or on). Don’t want them numbered? Choose View > Numbering > Shots, and make sure the option is unchecked. You can also turn Camera Tops & Tails on and off using the View menu, so on any given page you can see what the previous and upcoming shots are—very handy for shooting scripts.

 There’s much more to say on this topic, but let me point you to a new video on the topic until we return….

As a reminder, Story Plus is available as part of every full Adobe Creative Cloud membership (which you can subscribe to for a limited time for just $29.99USD/month and get access to ALL of Adobe’s creative tools), or you can subscribe to Adobe Story Plus (for $180USD/year or $24.99USD/month). If you’re using Story Free (which has all of the core tools you need to write scripts and screenplays), you can create three schedules—which should be enough to whet your appetite. You can always sign into Adobe Story (or create a new free account if you don’t already have one) by navigating to story.adobe.com.

In our last blog post, we introduced some of the features around scheduling in Story. But we din’t really delve into one of the key advantages, which is that if your script changes (and really, when doesn’t it change at the last minute?), you can simply refresh your schedule. That’s cool.

What’s even cooler is the fact that between the script (or block of scripts) and the schedule (which of course can be for a single script or a block of related episodes being shot together), you can automatically generate a whole bunch of reports. Really useful reports, like shooting order scripts, camera cards, call sheets, and so on. With Story, the process is easy. And keeping the reports up to date is equally simple: if the script changes, just refresh the report.

Here’s a short video that introduces some of the basics. There’s a lot to cover, though, so we’ll likely dive deeper into some of the reports in more detail in later posts.

As a reminder, Story Plus is available as part of every full Adobe Creative Cloud membership (which you can subscribe to for a limited time for just $29.99USD/month and get access to ALL of Adobe’s creative tools), or you can subscribe to Adobe Story Plus (for $180USD/year or $24.99USD/month). If you’re using Story Free (which has all of the core tools you need to write scripts and screenplays), you can create three schedules—which should be enough to whet your appetite. You can always sign into Adobe Story (or create a new free account if you don’t already have one) by navigating to story.adobe.com.

Even Hollywood blockbusters have to work with finite resources—whether it’s the star of the show, a location, or crew availability—and chances are that whatever production you’re working on has to work within many, many more constraints.

Adobe Story Plus includes powerful built-in scheduling tools that can really help you make the most of the time you have available. This video goes beyond the basics, and shows you how to customize your schedule, sort scenes within a schedule, and make sure the resources you need are available when you require them.

The ability to seamlessly integrate your scripts and the schedules required to produce them is key to what makes Story so unique. For complex productions, you also need to be able to compare schedules to catch any potential conflicts, such as a cast member needed in two locations at the same time, or two different crews that want to use the same set at the same time. This new video introduces how this works in Story Plus. But a word of caution—your script has to include timing information for each scene, otherwise the conflicts won’t show up.

Story Plus is available as part of every full Adobe Creative Cloud membership (which you can subscribe to for a limited time for just $29.99USD/month and get access to ALL of Adobe’s creative tools), or you can subscribe to Adobe Story Plus (for $180USD/year or $24.99USD/month). If you’re using Story Free (which has all of the core tools you need to write scripts and screenplays), you can create three schedules—which should be enough to whet your appetite.

And remember, you can always sign into Adobe Story (or create a new free account if you don’t already have one) by navigating to story.adobe.com.

Screenwriting is no different. Well, it can be—sometimes a writer gets to work on and develop an idea working alone, and for those folks, Adobe Story Free is perfect, as it includes all the core writing tools to create scripts formated to industry standards. But more often than not, even developing a script is collaborative—and that’s another area where Adobe Story Plus shines. From sharing projects to tracking changes and versions of a script, Adobe Story Plus offers an enterprise-class solution for collaborating on screenplays of all types.

This video introduces the sharing and collaboration features built into Adobe Story Plus.

Adobe Story Plus is part of a full Adobe Creative Cloud membership (you can also just subscribe to Adobe Story Plus if you prefer). And remember, you can always sign into Adobe Story (or create a new Story Free account if you don’t already have one) just by navigating to story.adobe.com.