STATE as a Writing Tool for “Felix”

AstronautsInCave_s

I continued to use the STATE animation program to help me rewrite “Felix” this week. I finished a couple of scenes.

I made a few changes to the scene I started on last week. In it the two astronauts explore “the target area”. Then I extracted the dialogue from the STATE file. STATE stores the dialogue and other information in an XML file. All I needed to do was open it up and do a little reformatting.

I transferred the dialogue to Word, and then I used that as a basis to write the version for the story. I did make some minor changes to the dialogue, but most of the work was to add in descriptions of the location and the action.

I felt that it went quite smoothly. I feel that the text flows quite well.

I went on to do another scene. In it the astronauts explore a cave next to “the target area”. For some reason this didn’t seem to work as well. I’m not sure why. Maybe I tried to go too fast. I went through the same process to convert the dialogue into text for the story. Nevertheless, I felt that the process did help and the result was better than if I had just worked with the text and not the animation.

Next week looks like I’ll be busy with other things, so I won’t likely get much done on “Felix”.

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