ScreenWriting
It’s amazing how in this day and age I can’t find a product that I and lots of other people need really badly. I am talking about SCREENPLAY WRITING SOFTWARE.
I currently use Movie Magic Screenwriter, a terribly over-priced but adequate program. Functionally, it’s okay, though it feels like something created in 1990. What sucks about it is that it uses a proprietary file format. If I want to share a screenplay with a collaborator, they have to have Movie Magic Screenwriter too.
There are other screenwriting programs available, all expensive, all sharing this fatal flaw. The lack of open standards has prevented screenplay software from advancing technically, which is somewhat of a minor point, as the needs of a screenwriter are quite simple, the most basic of which is, of course, being able to share files with your co-writers.
This is a great monopolistic practice, and the software companies have been getting away with it because Hollywood is a huge, bloated industry and $300 per person software is nothing compared to one day’s coffee budget. It sucks for the small, starving independent film producer, though.
Most writers use Final Draft, which is quite similar to Movie Magic Screenwriter, (which is what most production companies use). Since the two programs use different, proprietary formats, there are actually lots of people employed re-typing scripts written in Final Draft by writers into Movie Magic Screenwriter, so the scripts can be shot by production companies.
There are other, less expensive programs on the market, but the cheapest by far is celtx, which is free. For a free program, it isn’t bad, but it has some huge fatal flaws, as least in the early version I tried out. Instead of one file, your scripts are saved as projects, which are a cluster of files. This is totally unworkable, as it makes sharing files a huge mess. celtx tries to get around this by hosting your files on their server, allowing your collaborators to access them from there. This is such a bad idea, it boggles my mind. Who wants their precious work hosted on somebody else’s computer? That is totally insane. I want to simply drag a file as an attachment into an email and send it. Why is that so hard?
celtx points out the path to the right solution, though. They based their program on Firefox, which is open source. Their file formats are based on common web-markup languages, which are more than adequate to deal with the limited amounts of metadata that screenwriters need. celtx gets it wrong in trying to build a business model out of hosting your files on their server and trying to integrate too many other functions into the program.
All that we screenwriters need is this: An open file standard based on HTML and CSS and a simple plug-in for Firefox so we can type our screenplays directly into our browser. (Just look at TiddlyWiki to see what can be done with Firefox without even needing a plug-in.) (Actually, maybe somebody could simply customize a TiddlyWiki into a screenplay writing program…) Since Firefox works on almost all of the computer platforms out there, ANYONE could then write a screenplay, and share it easily with any of their friends.
Now don’t get me started on budgeting and scheduling software…
