Federico was kind enough to link to some of my posts, especially the one that talked about movie production software. Since that’s led to a lot of people from free software planets clicking through to here, I figure it’d be good to talk a bit more about it.

Federico says that I talk about “obsolete tools”. That’s not strictly correct, Final Draft, for instance, isn’t so much obsolete as it is finished. In its current design, without substantial rewrites and rethinking of the philosophy, there’s not much more it can do, except for perhaps fixes for some annoying and random limitations (screenplays can be saved as PDF, but treatments can’t, for instance).

From what I’ve seen, when software is finished in that sense, there’s an opening for new software to come in and take its place. It usually takes all the good things from the old program’s user interface, and improves the underlying architecture and philosophy to the point where wholly new things are possible. I’ve used Final Draft 6 for several years, ever since I started dabbling in writing screenplays, and it’s actually quite slick for the basic writing process. Screenplays are written in a very strict format, and Final Draft is basically a text editor that does all that formatting for you, so all you have to think about is the text itself. For that, it’s great, and it’s by far the most used screenplay editor. The other main contender being a macro package for Microsoft Word, which does basically the same thing, but is somewhat more cumbersome, and obviously required MS Word.

What should a new, free screenplay editor do, ideally? A lot of work should probably go into the file format. The basic format is easy to define, since the screenplay format has changed almost nothing in the last 20-30 years (and little before that, too). XML is an obvious choice, the DTD wouldn’t even be particularly complicated or large. Then you would need to replicate Final Draft’s rough editing interface, which is that of a text editor with a monospaced font and some special formatting, and a few special hotkeys. That’s all you need for a basic editor, I could write a screenplay just fine with that.

From there, there are two directions you could go. One is to make it better for screenwriters, which on one hand would include things like advanced (optionally server-based) revision control and collaboration features. Final Draft has some rudimentary revision control, along the lines of the revision control in MS Word, and it’s had over the internet collaboration for a few years, where two people can work on the same screenplay, and do text-based chat. Free software could probably do both of these better, by offering a range of revision control and backup options, integrated with Subversion and Arch, and the collaboration stuff is perfect for GOCollab.

Additional features for screenwriters would be to improve the things that are not about writing the screenplay itself. Final Draft is very screenplay-oriented, and does little to provide tools for story development. You can write treatments, but they’re basically just text documents, and you can work with “index cards”, but that’s just another view of the scenes in a screenplay. A real index-card mode with color coding and various other features, some way to look at events and subplots, there are many things that can be done here.

On the other hand, there are a lot of non-screenwriter things that involve the script. The final version of the script (called the shooting script, the one with numbered scenes) is used as a backbone and reference for everyone involved in the production, from preproduction through shooting to postproduction. Production assistants, sound engineers, art department, location scouts, editors, CGI artists, everyone uses an annotated version of the shooting script as a reference for their work.

Final Draft uses a separate program, called the Final Draft Tagger, to do some of this breakdown. It allows you to tag bits of the script with various codes to signify cast member, prop, costume, sound effect, set dressing, etc., for use in budgeting and scheduling, but it’s fairly basic. Using XML namespaces and server-based revision control, everyone could add their own data to the script, maintaining a centralized copy where everyone could sign off on the information. Daily call sheets could be almost automatically generated from this, as could a wealth of other information.

There’s much more that could be done, especially extending into the production and post-production, but as a starting point, something with this feature set would absolutely kill all the competition, and it’d be a great place to start for extending into production and budgeting, shooting, and post-production, and at some point becoming a complete system for movie production work, unlike anything that exists today.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 12th, 2005 at 9:04 pm and is filed under Screenwriting, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.