Scripting Graduations

I'm scheduled to cover three graduations, starting with two tomorrow. I got scripts for two of them. I've never used a script before. I saw someone use one once, and they told me a few things. I also watched the two-hour AccuCap training video, so I at least saw what's possible there, although nothing really stuck concretely since it wasn't relevant to me at the time. I spent about five or six hours formatting the first script. It took me forever just to figure out how to name segments using script commands.

I also learned that copying and pasting from Word is not a good idea, after I had already edited the entire script. I had to go back through and take out all these weird little places where the tabs in Word didn't show up in the script, but when I pushed them through realtime, they were making this weird arrow. I had to look up how to format songs, because at one graduation they're playing the National Anthem, and at both they're going to sing the Alma Mater.

I had to put tons of professor names in my dictionary, and text global all kinds of stuff to make sure it's going to come out capitalized properly even if I don't have time to do it manually.  I put a little note to myself in the spaces where someone is likely to talk and it's not scripted, so I'll have a little bit of a head's up that I need to start writing. My biggest worry right now about the whole deal is that I'm going to accidentally send out one of those notes!

I don't have a script yet for the first graduation, and it's at 1:30 tomorrow. If I have to just write it live, at least I kind of know the process since I've read the scripts for the other two.

I was able to use a cool shortcut I saw on the Eclipse FB group to help me out with scripting. I tested out how I'm going to arrange everything on the actual day, and it was tough fitting all the windows in, so I got rid of the notes display with Ctrl+Shift+F5, which was a huge help.