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In my seemingly never-ending search for a Mac replacement for the Final Draft screenwriting program (you can see a previous post on this subject here), I stumbled across a free program called, strangely, Celtx (which sounds like some kind of UNIX command line interpreter rather than something creative). I’d looked at this briefly, some time ago, but my thinking then was, “if it’s free, just how good can it be?” At that stage, as well, I seem to recall it was pretty primitive, the edit window opening in a browser or something like that (I may very well be very wrong about this fact).

Now desperate, sick to death at looking at Final Draft’s thin, barely readable screen font, I decided to give it another try.

My first impression, after installing and firing it up, was that it had already beat Montage, from Mariner Software, on my main criticism which was the handling of “mores” and “continueds”. It typed out a page in Celtx, purposely making a long dialog speech at the end of the page, and, although the edit window doesn’t give you page breaks (which led me to be a bit confused, as I typed and typed and typed, with no end in sight), until you click the “TypeSet” tab, which shows you “a pixel perfect” (according to their marketing material) version of the page as it will be printed. Clearly a work-around for a programming problem, but one that I am happy to live with. When I am writing, I have no real concern for how my pages will be laid out, but when I am reading, I do. My usual process with Final Draft is to write, then save a pdf and read that (like I said, the courier display font that FD uses is barely readable on a 17″ laptop screen, with the program’s level of zoom only going to an inadequate 150%), then flip back to Final Draft if any editing needs to be done. At least with Celtx, I just have to click a tab and all the work is done for me. Another tab click and I go back to editing, etc.

Anyway, happy with that first test, I decided to give it a run in the real world. About halfway through my second draft of my current screenplay, “Shivering Kings”, I was in need of something to freshen my mind a little bit, so I thought I’d write the rest with Celtx.

This is when some cracks began to show. The Celtx website proudly proclaims, “#1 choice for media pre-production”, and they mean it; there are no import tools for other screenplay formats per se, although a FAQ on their site says that you should export a txt file from Final Draft (for example), then import that using the “import script” command. Well, easier said than done. Maybe it’s just the way that I write scripts not jiving with the way Celtx interprets them, but I ended up with a huge string of dialogue under the heading of my first scene slug.

I suppose I could have, quite easily, gone through the dialog chunk and re-formatted it all for action, scene slugs and transitions, but I wanted to see what Celtx was made of, so, I retyped my first 60 page by hand (besides, coming from years of writing script on an olde-fashioned typewriter, I have always felt the best way to revise is to go through the process of typing everything out again, you really get a better sense of what is just not working, i.e., if you’re not absolutely thrilled about typing out a scene in the first place, an audience is going to be just as uninspired watching it), and I have to say, for the most part, Celtx is pretty intuitive. The smart-type, for scene slugs (the location bit at the start of a scene) needs to be thought out a little better, as it pops up, usually when you’re at the bottom of the page/screen (typing from beginning to end, as most human beings do) and blocks what you’re trying to enter. This is fine if the slug already exists and you want to choose from the list, but it’s not so great if you’re starting a brand new one.

But, the interface looks great, meaning, it doesn’t look like a poorly-thought-through port of a Windows program like Final Draft does. Included are sidebars on either side, which expand into a list of scenes (which can be toggled to scene descriptions, which is very handy for navigation), notes, media, breakdown, etc. Multiple document types can be stored within a “project” as well, which is great for someone like me, who keeps pages of notes on ideas and character and structure while writing.

Celtx also includes an index cards feature (not as elegant looking as the index cards in Scrivener, from Literature & Latte) and a similar storyboards feature which allows you to attach images (or a series of images) to a scene and even play them back in a kind of slideshow. I don’t know anyone who would ever want to do this, but there you go, you can do it if you want.

But what happens when I’m done? Well, that’s Celtx’s Achilles heel, and something I hinted at with their seeming disregard for importing other file formats. When you’re done your screenplay, you can print, and then you’re pretty much stuck within Celtx for the rest of the production. Final Draft’s one and only key advantage is that it is pretty much an industry standard, having gone through years and years of development with the input of industry professionals. While Celtx seems slightly more professionally guided than Montage, assuming that you want to 1) use Celtx for the duration of the shoot and 2) will be able to convince the entire production team to do the same, is a little blinkered. True, it does contain a calendar, where you can schedule, and some extremely rudimentary breakdown tools (I can only seem to breakdown “sides” for the actors), there’s no way you could hand one of these printed reports to anyone in the industry and have them take you seriously, and, because there are no export tools, an A.D. or P.M. will have to sit down with a hard copy of the script if they need to break it down with another tool, like Movie Magic Scheduling or Budgeting.

But, having said all that, Celtx, at the moment (based on a skim through the message boards), seems to be geared toward the producers of animated YouTube videos and machinima, and for that (where your schedule concerns mainly non-human, virtual characters) I’d guess those extra tools are great.

For now, I’ll keep using Celtx, at least for the duration of this second draft, but it’s a shame about the major downside. Montage advertises it’s Final Draft compatibility as one of its main features (and it actually works for the most part), so I know it’s technically possible. However, from the wording on Celtx’s website, it seems like they aren’t really all that interested in playing with “the Other Guys”. But, hey, what can you expect for free?

Have an opinion about Celtx, Final Draft or Montage? Know any other good screenwriting software? Fell free to leave a comment below.

Continued in Celtx vs. Final Draft Round Two.

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