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In my last post on the subject, I was reasonably pleased with Celtx as an alternative to Final Draft, mainly because it worked beautifully as a native OS X application (especially the font handling) whereas Final Draft seems like it’s just been abandoned on the Mac platform.

Maybe it’s because screenwriters don’t use Macs. That can’t be true, can it?

Anyway, the one major downfall I found with Celtx (apart from its clunky name) was its own reliance on itself as the working environment you will remain in for the rest of the production, which, I’m sorry, just ain’t gonna happen anytime soon. I, like many others, are looking for an alternative to Final Draft, not looking to convert the entire industry overnight. That’s just way too much work.

So, I’ve happily been revising and plodding forward (on a real screenplay), and my eyes have never been happier — apart from some minor irritations here and there, like a few quirks in the text editor and the seeming inability to call up the standard “fonts” menu that’s available in every other Mac app — but I’ve been unable to escape this nagging feeling that once I’m done my screenplay, I’ve got to get the damn script out of the program. Sure, I can print and make beautiful-looking pdf’s until I’m blue in the face, but the time is going to come when have to lock the script (see below) and someone’s gonna wanna pull my Final Draft-compatible copy into something to do a breakdown.

While Celtx has some extremely rudimentary scheduling and breakdown tools (which you couldn’t seriously use in any sizable production), the package on the whole doesn’t seem all that concerned about what happens once you’ve finished the script. Locking and revisions are a huge thing that, I have to admit, I completely overlooked in my initial excitement with the new piece of software. Unless I’m missing something, it doesn’t look like there’s any way to lock your script in the current version of Celtx, which is another mark against it.

For new screenwriters who have yet to get their scripts into production, basically, when you (and the producers and director and whoever else has a say) are happy with your final draft, you lock the script. This more or less marks the beginning of the production, at least from the script’s standpoint. Any revisions that happen after this point — being the point that everyone on the crew has a copy of the script that they’ve begin marking up and making notes on — come as separate, colored pages, which can be inserted into the scripts that everyone already has, without killing a whole lot of trees or pissing off a lot of creative people who have made some very detailed notes. As with every other aspect of script formatting, there are specific rules for how these pages are formatted, and Final Draft, like it or not, has always done this exceedingly well and with very little fuss.

The Ins and Outs of Celtx … literally

When I first started my spin around the block with Celtx, I wasn’t working from scratch; I already had a screenplay that was half complete. My reasonable efforts to import what I’d begun in Final Draft were all a miserable failure, and a lot of Googling later I discovered that there was no secret door or key combo I had to jump through, it was just the way the two formats spoke to each other and it didn’t look like the software developer was losing any sleep over it.

So, I bit the bullet and started typing the whole thing out again from scratch. Which was fine. I had a pretty good idea I’d have to export at some point, but as long as I had a pleasurable time writing the screenplay, I could worry about that later. There’s nothing wrong with using two programs, especially when one of them is free! But when I get to the end (which will be soon), what are my options?

Well, it turns out, pretty much the same as when I started. Here’s my script in Celtx:

I did a Script+Export Script.. and here’s what it looks like in Final Draft (File+Open, Import type: script):

Looks like what Final Draft’s importer does is look for caps and assumes that the first one is a scene heading and that the next one’s going to be a character heading. Well, no two scripts are alike. I can’t fault Final Draft for this though, it’s exactly the same way it looked when I tried exporting-importing in the other direction. I fiddled and fussed for a bit (for example, my first scene heading was just “LIMBO”, so I changed that, temporarily to something more strict, “INT. ROOM - NIGHT”) but the best I can come up with is a script that’s formatted with a scene heading, one paragraph of action, then about 100 pages of straight dialogue (which combines transitions, scene headings, action, etc).

Cleaning this mess up, like I reasoned before, is going to be like typing the whole thing over again. So, yeah. Bit of a mess I’ve gotten myself into there.

“Just when I think I’m out …”

Now I feel a lot like Michael Corleone, back in the Final Draft family again, even though I don’t want to be there. Ah, well. I feel normal now. But I really wish someone would come up with a reasonable screenwriting program for Mac that doesn’t draw my attention away from the matter at hand (writing) with concerns about fonts, formatting and crashing.

There have got to be more aspiring and working writers out there than aspiring and working editors, so why doesn’t Apple craft something that they could tie right into Final Cut? I guess that’s really wishful thinking.

Postscript

I have to admit, based on a comment to my last post, I did briefly look at the demo for Screenwriter from Movie Magic, but boy! Did that give me a headache! First glance, I liked all the options (especially the dynamic formatting for the outline cards on the side of the screen), but, call me lazy, I didn’t feel like starting a learning curve all over again from scratch. Besides, despite having an enticing set of advanced options for the task, Screenwriter couldn’t import my Celtx-exported screenplay either.

Related posts:

1. Celtx vs. Final Draft, Round One
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2. Is Montage the Final Draft killer?
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