If you…

,,,have always done your writing on a legal pad and/or believe that computers ruin the organic flow of the writing process, then:

You are a Final Draft Person. You are all about the words on the page, no fuss, no muss. Ignore those crazy features like index cards and embrace the blank page.

…can’t brush your teeth without your iPod and/or take your digital camera to the laundromat just in case, then:

You are a Celtx User. Drop an mp3 and a few .jpg files into that scene you’re working on for inspiration.

…alphabetize your grocery list and/or arrange it according to the store’s layout, then:

Sophocles is probably your best bet. As you write, keep track of exactly where you are in your outline. Switch to a handy chart that tells you how your huge cast of characters connects to each other.

…haven’t seen anything that applies to you so far, then:

Try Movie Magic Screenwriter. As a great man once said, it’s “boxy but good.”

because even though I’m a noob, I downloaded it to a Fedoracore3 pc, saved a copy of the instructions, hunted through files to find firefox path (it was /usr/bin/firefox), created the launcher by pasting that path on that line given in the instructions, replacing it’s generic path, pasted all of it in the laucher window, and then didn’t know exactly where the icon would be hanging out at, but I just happened to have a cool looking clapboard.jpg in home… and it worked, starts right up and seems easy to use.

Now if we could get them to make it just like moviemagic, I could erase windows completely my old laptop, and would be a very happy man.

I haven’t written with celtx yet, but will try it within a few days. I will save a MM script as an rtf and import it into celtx, and if it makes it in without losing any of the formating, I’ll do some editing and report how it went.

Thx!

The particularly cool thing about Sophocles is that you can develop your story outline within the program itself, before ever writing a word. I don’t mean it has a cheesy story design toolset like other so-called story design programs, which never made sense to me. I mean that in an uncheesy way you can process your thoughts on characters, actions, overall plot and subplot design in a useful fashion that can later be integrated directly into your script when you actually begin writing. Since I usually outline on paper and pencil, I can now do it just as freely in Sophocles.

Not too mention the phenomenal script reporting features it offers. It will draw a screen full of character relationships for every speaking part in the film, allowing a visual reference to the key players. Also offers incredible statistics on individual characters, # scenes, speaking lines, your average paragraph length, timing, location reporting, and gobs of other information viewable in an intuitive interface.

And much much more.. Budgeting, auto-script breakdown… the list goes on and on…

Final Draft offers some of these features, but doesn’t do them all that well.

Also, the editing is unforgiving. It’s hard to explain but for you to generate reports, you have to define your characters and if you make a mistake in your definitions, you can’t edit them or delete them.

If you’re Apple based, I’d pass on it for now.

Kudos to Celtx for a good start though – the direction looks promising (and very Sophocles like).

Just wanted to drop a note to let you know that we have just released a new Celtx (version 0.8.8).

Eightyeight includes good stuff like pagination, spellchecking, find & replace, hotkeys, and a host of new print options.

Check it out!

Steve Pick celtx.com