An average of once a day, I find myself briefly marvelling at how some new technological advance — the Internet especially — makes my life a bit more efficient. When I started writing professionally, for instance, we had to actually type scripts out on paper and deliver that paper somewhere. If that location was in town, someone had to get in a car and drive the paper there. If it was out of town, someone had to get in a car, go to a post office and mail an envelope. In the last decade or so, delivery has gotten swifter and therefore so has collaboration.
On The Garfield Show, which is my main current endeavor, it is not uncommon to find me here at 4 AM, as I am now, swapping e-mails with our production crew in France and with Jim Davis in Indiana. When I started on Garfield in the eighties, its producer bought me my first fax machine so I could fax scripts and notes back to Jim. One time I recall being up at 5 AM, sending a script his way. Jim was reading the pages as they arrived in his office and he phoned me to discuss story points on Page 2 while I was still feeding Page 14 into the fax machine. I also recall another time when I was writing a different show for France. I was in a hotel room in Las Vegas at 4 AM and I was faxing pages straight from my laptop — this is pre-Internet, over a dial-up connection — to Paris and thinking, "This is as close as I'm ever going to get to being James Bond."
The other day, I discovered a tiny but useful bit of techo-timesaving. I handle the voice-direction on The Garfield Show, a job which includes getting the scripts copied before each recording session. Usually, I stick my tireless assistant Darcie with that chore. This time, we were running so late that I had to handle it, and it was a cinch thanks to a service that the FedEx Office company has called Print Online.
We were recording Tuesday morning. At 7 PM Monday evening, I finally had the scripts completed. Now, in the old days, what would happen on a cartoon show is that someone would then have to retype the scripts into a special format from which the actors can easily read. This is no longer necessary. I write my scripts with a software called Movie Magic Screenwriter. Years ago, when this program was first being developed (it was called Script Thing then), I struck up an e-mail correspondence with its author and suggested he include this feature, and I even sent him an animation recording script so he could copy its format. And now, sure enough, Movie Magic Screenwriter will output your script in that format. So instead of someone retyping the whole thing, the conversion takes about ten seconds.
I converted my scripts thusly to PDF format, then went to the FedEx Office site and found the appropriate page (it's this one). There, I uploaded the scripts, specified the number of copies I wanted, the kind of paper, whether I wanted them collated or stapled or three-hole-punched, etc. I then selected the address of a FedEx Office near me that stays open 24 hours, as many do, and I paid online with a credit card. Two hours later, they e-mailed that my order was ready for pick-up at that address and I drove over. I could have sent the scripts in at 3 AM and gone over to get them at 5 AM or (more likely) picked them up on my way to the recording studio in the morning.
I love this kind of thing. I have so many that I wonder why there's any waste of time ever in my life. Must be all those hours I have to spend fixing my computer, configuring my iPhone, unjamming my printer, etc.