News on the Screenwriting Tools Battle Front

It seems like an eternity since the last update of Final Draft, but in fact it’s only (!) been 4 years — which is an eternity in a time when Firefox and Chrome seem to update nearly weekly.

During this time, Celtx has developed a suite of (semi-)integrated screenwriting tools; Adobe has developed Story as part of its Creative Cloud; screenwriter John August and others have developed the Fountain markup language as the foundation for a number of new authoring tools; cloud storage has become de rigueur due to Dropbox and other services; and script composition on the iPad and other tablets has become increasingly desirable.

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Screenwriting Conference at Santa Fe: 6/1-6/6

I’m excited to be back on the faculty of the upcoming Screenwriting Conference at Santa Fe running from June 1-June 6 in lovely Santa Fe, NM. Heavy hitter screenwriters Kirk Ellis, Josh Olson and others join me on the faculty, and Oscar-winning producer Tony Marks and one of my graduate school professors and thesis advisors (Howard Suber) will be part of the Hollywood Connection portion of the conference. Immerse yourself in screenwriting the first week in June: sign up for the conference!

Synapse to Screen 1.0

We’re still “under construction” here at alt.screenwriters, but in the meantime, I’ll be speaking and presenting at the first annual Synapse to Screen Conference being held in conjunction with the Santa Fe Film Festival on Wednesday, December 3. The conference looks at media content creation tools, and pre-production and production tools.

I’ll be comparing tools like Celtx, Movie Magic Screenwriter and Final Draft, both from an outlining/brainstorming standpoint and from the actual scripting standpoint.

The full slate of presenters is still being put together, but it’ll be interesting to see how big an audience exists for an event focused on scripting, budgeting and scheduling tools.