Scrolling, Pinching, Pulling and other script manipulation

If you’re not already looking at a script, bring up Rehearsal’s main menu, and tap on My Scripts – that’s your library of the scripts your working on. If you haven’t forwarded anything over to the app from your email, there won’t be anything there. But if you have, it’s waiting for you in that list of scripts. And don’t worry – Rehearsal keeps very close tabs on everything you do, so when you go back to it after a time away, it’s all there, just as you’ve left it. We’ve put the sides from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the App as an example to play with. Don’t worry about the other scripts we have in there for now – they are there to illustrate some features of Rehearsal we’ll explore in a bit.

Tap on the script called A Midsummer Night’s Dream to bring up the actual sides themselves – and while you’re at it, turn your iPhone so that it’s in “landscape mode” – wider than it is tall. The script will look like a little picture of the script:

Wow. That’s…small. But don’t worry. The iPhone is great at making things just the right size. So let’s use the two finger pinch gesture to “pull” the image of the script out, just the way we want it. Take two fingers, and “spread” the image out. See how it gets bigger?

Don’t worry if you go to far and the words get too big – you can always do the reverse: take those two fingers of yours and “pinch” the image in. See how it gets smaller? Now, just play with it until you see just the words of the characters (yours, and your scene partners’ lines) filling the width of the screen. We did this so that you can practice with the standard format that TV and film scripts use: centered narrow columns for dialog.

If you’re eagle-eyed and you want to use Rehearsal in portrait mode (and see smaller type and more of the script per screenful), you can. It’s your choice.

Feel free to use your finger to scroll through the pages of your script to see what exactly is entailed in this audition. We’re going to be doing the exact same thing we’d be doing in the real world with this script. And anything you do to the script from here on out will be remembered by Rehearsal so you can listen, watch, highlight, make Comments and more over and over and over. Now that we’ve got our script right where we want it, let’s start working with it.

In a short set of sides, your entire script might consist of only one or two scenes. In this case, we’ve got two separate scenes the City Center director wants to see you perform. If you use your finger to scroll through the script’s 2 pages, you’ll see them, one on each page. You can choose to make one long scene out of it, or, since the two scenes don’t follow each other in Shakespeare’s play (in fact, like with most 2-scene auditions, having those two scenes as your audition shows the director how you can turn the character), you can make two different scenes.

Creating the different scenes is a snap in Rehearsal. Let’s start with something we’re all used to: highlighting our lines.

Next: Highlight