Here she is boiz, here she is world: Timelapse of my LION KING JR. FRANKENSCRIPT
Real time: ~ 2.5 hours
Script length: 127 pages
This was the first time I’ve ever used this particular method of exporting every page of the PDF as an image (.jpeg) and then inserting them into my .doc file in Word and it was BY FAR the easiest time I’ve ever had. In the past I’ve dragged and dropped score pages into my document (you can imagine the mess that made with text wrapping, page breaks, etc.), typed out all of the script pages, exported those as PDFs, and then dropping them into the score... I’ve tried it all. This process seems like the winner, folks. Lots of help from Google and ultimately, these 2 pages:
https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/quick-tip-how-to-save-all-pdf-pages-as-images/
https://wordribbon.tips.net/T010727_Inserting_Multiple_Graphics_in_a_Document.html
That first link (premiumbeat) lead me to use my first ever automator/script... and like HOLY MOLY Y’ALL that was some legit digital witchcraft. Life. Changed. Normally this process alone takes HOURS. You might see in the video that I had to spend some time rotating the images once they were created... that has everything to do with the original PDF scan. If you’ve ever dealt with a piano/vocal or conductor score, you know that they’re that weird 9x12 paper (or something like that and sometimes copiers/readers/drivers try to party with the images you’re sending to them.
You might notice that the original script has music in it, so why go through the bother of doing this version of the script?
While the script DOES have music, it’s only the vocal line. So it omits things like dance breaks, underscoring, AND the piano line. As a stage manager who reads music and uses it quite a lot during the process to make sense of timing, having both the vocal line AND the piano line is really important. But also: How neat is it that the books for these Jr. productions have the vocal line in them? I wish all librettos were like that -- it would make everyone’s lives SO much easier.