For the past 18 months, I’ve been doing all my new writing in Fountain rather than a heavyweight screenwriting app like Final Draft or Movie Magic Screenwriter.
I love working in Fountain so much that I made a screencast to explain why it’s better:
For geek types, it’s easy to say that Fountain is like Markdown for screenplays. But that doesn’t explain why it’s better for day-to-day writing, so in this screencast I tried to show why a screenwriter might use a Fountain-based app instead of Final Draft or one of the other apps from the 1990s.
In the video, you’ll see that I’m including several comparatively new applications in this category of old-style apps. They may be recent, but programs like Fade In and Adobe Story work largely same way word processors did back when Will Smith was the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. They’re essentially Microsoft Word with custom style sheets. They don’t take advantage of how much faster computers have gotten, or the special things you can do when you’re handling structured text like screenplays.
The old apps were built for printing scripts from stand-alone computers. The new apps are built for the web, for phones and tablets, for everything that’s coming. It’s the flexibility and extensibility of Fountain that helps make new things possible.
As always, you can find out more info about Fountain at Fountain.io, including full explanation of the syntax and apps that have particularly good support for it.
You can get Highland, the app I used for this demo, from the Mac App Store.
Over this Thanksgiving break, why not give Fountain a try?