Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Finally.

Somebody has finally created some affordable screenwriting software. Affordable as in free.

Check it out at Celtx.com.

It's available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, and it includes several other pre-production tools. I've only had a few minutes to try it out, but I expect I'll be using it for my next screenplay.

So long, Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter!

7 comments:

Andrew Bellware said...

Man, I had a lot of server troubles with Celtx so I finally abandoned it. We almost always use collaborators when writing scripts, so it would have been really helpful but it just didn't work out.

Chance Shirley said...

Aw, man, I hate to hear that. What if you stay off the server and just stick with your local machine? Any problems there? To me, the collaboration stuff in nice, but if it doesn't work, it's not a deal-breaker.

Andrew Bellware said...

I didn't think it was all that awesome as a stand-alone application. I switched to Google docs for most stuff I need to share -- especially good in a production situation.

Chance Shirley said...

All bells and whistles aside, do you have any problems with Celtx as a stand-alone, inexpensive alternative to other screenwriting apps, like Final Draft?

Andrew Bellware said...

No, other than that I thought that Celtx was pretty good!

Anonymous said...

Hey Chance,

Have you heard of Plotbot? http://www.plotbot.com/
It's free and online. I played with it a little bit and it seemed cool, but was a little buggy. I'm sticking with MM for now. WHEN YOU GONNA FINISH THIS DAMN FILM?!?! I want to see it! -- Dave Hughens

Chance Shirley said...

Plotbot looks pretty neat, but I don't know if I'd want to write a whole feature on a web-based app. I mean, if GMail goes out of business tomorrow, I'll find another mail host. If I'm 80 pages into a screenplay and the online host pulls the plug... ouch.

As for when the movie will be finished, we have two more days of principal photography, plus a couple of days for effects stuff, then post-production. I'm hoping to start showing work-in-progress versions of the movie early autumn (2008).