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Bluebeam Goes Hollywood
Background
Hollywood script supervisor Trevor Roland works on a variety of film and television projects. His role requires him to take detailed production
notes of all scene blocking, camera positioning, costuming, prop usage and actor positioning. Script supervisors like Roland often carry around
large binders with hundreds of pages of scripts and production notes and markup pages by hand using industry-specific text comments, shapes
and lines. After every production day Roland distributes annotated scripts to editors and producers to help ensure continuity throughout
filming and editing.
Challenge
The traditional script supervision process is paper-intensive and time consuming. At the end of a long production day, Roland would review
hundreds of pages in his script binder, pull out all annotated pages and then photocopy and distribute them to editors and producers. This
duplication and distribution process typically added an additional 2 hours of work to every production day.
An avid Tablet PC user, Roland sought to find a Tablet-compatible PDF software solution to help
speed up his workflow process. Roland knew that only a Tablet PC would provide him with both the mobility he needed on set and the
functionality of using a Tablet pen to ink notes and draw industry-standard lines and shapes. Additionally, having an electronic file of the script
and annotations would reduce the time needed to duplicate and distribute script pages from hours to minutes.
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Solution Requirements
To improve his workflow Roland needed to find a solution with the following features:
- Ability to ink free text, lines and shapes onto a document with a Tablet PC pen
- Provide a list of all pages with markups so annotated pages could be easily located and distributed
- Save the file in a universal file format that could be emailed
Making Movie Magic with Bluebeam
By using Bluebeam PDF Revu Standard Edition, Roland has found a solution that meets all his
feature requirements. Using Bluebeam Revu's Tablet PC profile, Roland easily inks comments onto PDF versions of scripts - a common file format
used in the industry. Bluebeam's integration with the Tablet OS recognizes the inked words and converts it to text, making all notes clear and
easy to read. Additionally, Roland uses the pen and line markups to freehand industry-specific annotations onto script pages. As an added benefit,
Bluebeam Revu includes a tool chest where Roland stores commonly used markups - with customized properties such as color and line width - for
easy access across application sessions. These features have allowed Roland to migrate from a paper-intensive method to an electronic workflow
with virtually no process change.
Additionally, Roland has reduced the amount of time dedicated to duplicating and distributing marked up scripts. At the end of the production day,
Roland pulls up Bluebeam's Markup List, which lists out every page that has been annotated. He then uses Bluebeam's page editing features to
extract annotated pages and combine them into a new PDF file and emails the file directly to editors and producers.
In the end, Roland has transitioned from a paper-intensive to an electronic workflow process with virtually no learning curve. He has reduced the
script duplication and distribution process from 2 hours per day to 15 minutes per day - an 80% time savings.
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