About Chrono Script, What the project is all about.

[Luminaire]

I am happy to announce the start of the Chrono Script project.

Objective
The primary goal of this project is to develop a screenplay for the classic role-playing game Chrono Trigger.

Motivation
Chrono Trigger (released in 1995 by Square) is my favorite video game. It is an epic than transcends genre, and everyone who has not experienced its magic is missing out. It has complex but realistic characters, beautifully-rendered graphics (especially for the 16-bit era), a gripping plot, and an amazing soundtrack.
Over the past few years I have grown increasingly convinced that Chrono Trigger could be successfully adapted to the big or small screen. In my first attempt to realize this I joined a project at the Chrono Compendium called the Chrono Trigger Flash Series. Chrono Script is a spinoff of this effort.

Join the Project
I strongly encourage anyone and everyone to become a team member. Contribute as much or as little as you want. Come and go as you please. There is no commitment. This project will only benefit from any help you can give.

To join the project, simply register at the official forum (you're here now), introduce yourself, and start posting! It's that easy!

[FaustWolf]

Ha! Bet you didn't expect this after 6 months+ with no new posts. Is this project continuing?

I must say, your scripts are quite professional from what I've seen so far -- have you had formal training, or did you learn scriptwriting by studying movie scripts? I've tried my hand at a Chrono Break script, but it turned out to be a mishmash of prose and dialogue -- more of a wacky scriptment than anything else. I haven't picked it back up since joining the Compendium, since I've found that it's way easier to draw people into a story by making a game out of it than simply by writing it (hence my drive for game resource liberation). Damn shame, since scriptwriting is a wonderful art form.

I *will* get back to the Chrono Cross Model Project as soon as I'm finished with two editions of the CC Magil patch. I thought it would be a quick project, but then the bug reports flowed in. The fan community can't thank you enough for coding the model import plugin! CC model viewing is not simply a novelty; it is most likely that, if we want to overhaul Chrono Cross, we'll need to do a from-scratch fangame using the game's resources in a 3D engine of our choosing.

In which case, we'll need a script...

[Luminaire]

It has indeed been a long time since I've posted here. Probably too long. To make up for that I have composed a fairly lengthy post that is as follows. It's a "State of Chrono Cinema" address of sorts.



The Past

It was not long after joining the Compendium in April 2005 (wow, it's nearly been three years!) that I got involved with a project called the Chrono Trigger Flash Series, an effort to tell the story of Chrono Trigger as a series of short flash movies. After a short time the project leader left to move on to another project (Crimson Echoes?), and I tried unsuccessfully to revive the project and then merge it with another similar effort. The leader of that project ended up disappearing from the internet for more than a year, and so you can imagine a bit of frustration on my part.

At the time I was still very much interesting in penning a Chrono Trigger screenplay, and so I started a new effort focused exclusively on that goal. Unfortunately, the Chrono community was only mildly interested in a Flash series in the first place, and I could never generate much enthusiasm for "just" a screenplay. You'll notice the member count of this forum remains less than ten at the time of this post.

However, I was buoyed in my effort by a member of this forum with the handle Tai001. Without his feedback, patience, and encouragement I would never have made it as far as I did. When I started writing I swore I would not end up like the leaders of the previous efforts, and I fear that I have broken that promise somewhat.



The Present

My background is in engineering and I have no formal training in writing outside of the courses required for my undergraduate degree. That said, I would love to write on the side of my engineering career, and it is amazing how much better my prose has become just from this project alone. Appropriately enough, my favorite author is Isaac Asimov.

I use LaTeX for almost all my writing these days - avoiding Word at all costs - and this project is no exception. It turns out that the screenplay PDF files I have provided don't subscribe completely to the screenplay formatting conventions. Most obvious is the use of a variable-width font rather than the standard fixed-width font (e.g. Courier New). Part of this is a consequence of my use of LaTeX, and part of it is personal preference.

As for the screenplay itself, I am exceedingly pleased with about the first two-thirds of Part I (up until the party reaches the End of Time for the first time) and am generally happy with most of the rest. Currently the draft stands complete up through the obtaining of the Epoch, which is probably about halfway through Part II and therefore about halfway through the planned trilogy.



The Future

Probably the most important question to answer is: where is this project headed?

Sadly I don't have nearly the free time that I had three years ago, and quite a bit of that is currently being devoted to helping extract the 3D model data from Chrono Cross. So the answer is, unfortunately, that I don't know if this project will go any further.

Were this project to continue, I would probably start by thinking through my choice of format again. As I recall, one of the concerns that led to this hiatus of sorts was about the pacing in Part III. Recently I've been thinking that a season of one-hour episodes would provide greater flexibility and generally be a better medium in which to tell the story of Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross (and perhaps someday Chrono Break).

I continue to look back at this project with fondness. Perhaps the only thing that has grown more than my writing ability is my appreciation for the wonder that is the Chrono series. I remain as convinced as I was three years ago that the Chrono story would make a wonderful screenplay.

[FaustWolf]

Highly interesting! Whatever happens, I look forward to reading the rest of what you've accomplished thus far; I could certainly learn a lot.

[Themage]

A great project non the less heres to hoping it continues and if not, it was a wonderful idea and did effect the chrono universe, at least for me.