CeltX and a Couple of Good Quotes

I remember complaining about in an earlier post that I thought CeltX couldn't put subtext in the middle of character speech. I'm not sure if this was true of the version I had, but the newest version allows you to select text, left-click and give format options, such as parenthetical. You can then copy and paste the parenthetical correctly where you want to in the script. If there's a more intuitive way of doing it, let me know.


Pulled these from the Screenwriting WikiQuote page:

[Screenwriting] is no more complicated than old French torture chambers, I think. It's about as simple as that.
-James L. Brooks

So the writer is the only person who's taking absolutely nothing, and 120 pages of it, and dirtying it up in such a way that it's gonna gross hundreds of millions of dollars and make a lot of people happy.
- Paul Guay

Res Hall Film Fest 2008

Today and last night, I've spent a good amount of time writing the screenplay to a currently untitled movie for the Residence Hall Film Festival at Iowa State University. Making this process easier is proper screenwriting software. A lot of people use Final Draft and the software is, as far as I can tell, an industry standard. I however am a big fan of CeltX.

CeltX is open source screenwriting software compatible with Mac, Win and Linux OS. There are a few things that's hard to do in it (like add speech subtext in the middle of dialogue), but for the most part does a high quality job. Collaboration servers can be set up for use in collaborative writing and I used this software through my screenwriting class. The importer was good enough to pull in plain text versions of poorly formatted Microsoft Word screenplays.

I suggest looking at the CeltX Wikipedia page to get a little more info if you're unsure what software to use. Otherwise, you can download the software at www.celtx.com.