The Wordplayer site has a good anecdote about why it’s important for screenwriters to stay active throughout production:
I’m on the set less than a minute and I see Miss Improvise, in costume, her makeup being touched up, all ready for the first master shot.
She’s supposed to be dead. Dead for at least twenty pages.
Definitely worth a read. Check it out here.
The Archives link, which has been broken ever since switching hosts, is now un-broken — which is not to say fixed.
In its previous incarnation, the Archives section could be sorted by category and date, in a variation on the familiar Sortable Nicer Archives kludge for WP. However, the database gods must have been angered, for all supplication cannot coax them to offer up their insight. Translation: something got broken, and damned if I can fix it.
So in the spirit of Something is better than Nothing, a click on the Archives section will show you every article in the system, from most recent to oldest. It’s not very user-friendly, but the Googlebots will love it.
The Show by Category buttons, incidentally, still work great. So that’s a better choice if you’re interested in reading just the Q and A’s, for example.
So far, I’ve worked on one movie in which the Earth is destroyed. In Titan A.E., a mysterious alien race called the Drej show up one day and blow up the Earth because…
…well, I don’t actually remember the motive. Plot wasn’t the strongest aspect of that movie.
What’s important is this: aliens did it. So if scientifically-minded viewers questioned the physics of how exactly the Earth was obliterated, I could simply point to the semi-transparent Drej and say, “With their superior technology, far beyond anything we can imagine!”
It’s a lucky thing that Titan A.E. had villainous aliens, because it turns out that destroying the Earth is extraordinarily difficult. With this site, Sam Hughes examines 18 possible methods for “geocide” — a terrific word that you just don’t get to use very often. His conclusion? Aspiring supervillains need to be patient, or very lucky, because mere mega-wealth won’t guarantee you the chance to smash the Earth to smithereens.
Keep in mind that Sam focuses strictly on physically destroying the planet. Merely making it uninhabitable is several orders of magnitude easier — and we’re already well on our way!
(Via Cruel.)
Steve wrote in to point out a new-ish screenwriting application under development called Celtx, which seems to incorporate a lot of features I’ve been clamoring for in terms of leveraging new technology. It’s certainly not a Final Draft killer yet, but it’s worthy of a look.
In many ways, this seems to be the screenwriting program I yearned to write. It’s open source, standards-based and well thought out. If I’d known I could get what I want by sitting on my ass and doing nothing, I would have not-done it sooner.
Celtx uses the Mozilla Application Framework, the same underlying technology as Firefox. That goes a long way towards making it platform independent, since Mozilla can run under Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It’s a two-edged sword, naturally: for sake of compatibility, it can’t use some only-on-Mac features and eye-candy.
Unlike Final Draft, which strives to keep the screen matching up exactly to the printed output, Celtx takes a more relaxed approach. All the standard formatting blocks are there (Scene Header, Action, Character, Dialogue, Transition), but there are no rulers or page breaks. That’s a reasonable choice; you shouldn’t worry about every (more) and (cont’d) as you write. The program generates .pdfs, rather than trying to print directly — again, a smart call. However, I suspect many writers will find they need more control when it comes time to print.
One of the biggest psychological hurdles with Celtx is how it handles screenplay files. Currently, they seem to reside on Celtx’s server, rather than staying local on a writer’s individual computer. (I say “seem” because each project shows a URL, and you’re not prompted where you’d like to save your file.) This client/server model makes a lot of sense for collaboration, but would make a lot of writers nervous, both in terms of access and security.
Update: The developer wrote in to say that files are indeed kept locally on your computer, unless published to the server. A “Save As…” feature is in progress, according to the support forum.
You can import an existing script from Final Draft or other screenwriting applications, but only by saving it first as a formatted text file. (Final Draft uses a proprietary file format; if any reader out there has figured out how to decode it, please write in.) My import test was a mixed bag. Most of the formatting came through intact, but it lost all of the character names at the head of dialogue blocks. I suspect that’s an easily-addressable problem, however.
More impressive than its importing function is Celtx’s ability to export. It generates .pdfs and HTML, which, if you look through the source code, is actually properly formatted with CSS, as opposed to Final Draft’s ridiculous wrapped text file.
I haven’t fully examined Celtx’s outline and resource capabilities, but you can flag elements such as characters and props, which can be useful for generating reports. (Not that I ever use this feature in Final Draft.)
Celtx is currently in beta. Right now, it doesn’t offer enough to get me to switch from Final Draft. But I’m certainly fascinated by it, and would encourage any interested reader to give it a try.