Narrative timeline in minutes of film or number of pages of script (not events timeline)

Feature Requests
#1

Hello.
First, I would like to thank you for your great software.
I would like to know if you could create a new timeline type related to the narrative beats and folders and not to the events.
You can see this type of timeline in the Causality Software for exemple :

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Or in Final Draft : The Outline Editor™: How to Use the Tool for Outlining Success
You can see this feature aims to represent the timeline of narration and not of the story, though it is spécific to the narrative and outiline views. It allows to organize the narration in term of minutes of the film you are writting, or in term of pages of the script.
As your software is dedicated to timelines, I think this feature is a must have :wink:
Have a good day,
Olivier

#2

Just out of curiosity, @obouilland : Wouldn’t it work for you to just create events named “Act I”, “Act II” ‘Catalyst’, “Debate”, etc.?
Or cleverly make use of calendar markers?

#3

I’ve not written a film script but I do use the Save the Cat beat system. I show how I do that in this video: https://youtu.be/8FR1325pZxI?si=qKlu0mGc-1uI3F05

In a nutshell, I track beats by creating a Beats item type and populating it with each of the beats, like this:

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As for tracking film runtime in minutes or number of script pages, there might be good news for you: In the forthcoming AT 3.5, my understanding is that the Narrative/Outline scene order can be shown in, say, the Timeline or Subway views–a feature I have been eagerly awaiting. In other words, you will no longer be limited to viewing Timeline events in strictly chronological order, but rather can view them in narrative order.

Plus, you will be able to set up multiple tabs of a given view type, such as the Timeline view. This suggests that you would be able to customize, say, a Timeline view according to minutes of runtime, which would tie into an item type field you could create for that.

I’m certainly no expert here, but perhaps something I’ve said will help. Hope so.