Paul Zadie

I’m starting pre-production on my next short film project called Broken Promise. In addition to being Director of Photography on this one, I’ll be producing. That means in reality I’ll be serving as the Producer, Production Manager, Production Coordinator, and Catering. I guess I’m really going to need a good 1st AD.

So my first step is doing a script breakdown. I typically use Final Draft Tagger for the breakdown, Showbiz Scheduling (formerly Company Move Show-Planner) for scheduling, and Showbiz Budgeting for uh… budgeting.

Most scripts are written with Final Draft, so this method works. But Final Draft gives me a headache with activation issues. I swear that the people who pirate the software don’t have to deal with the issues that legit customers put up with. DRM and copy protection suck, and only cause problems for the users who pay good money for software and media. I think this has been proven time and again. When are these companies going to learn? I digress.

Showbiz Budgeting works fine, so I’ll be sticking with it for now. Showbiz Scheduling on the other hand doesn’t run on my MacBook Pro because I use File Vault to keep my home folder encrypted. This is the only application that I have any issues with. For some reason, it is unable to find the user’s library folder to write application support files to when File Vault is in use on the system. But whatever. This is a fantastic piece of scheduling software. It runs fine on my Mac Pro, but I need to be mobile, and I’m not going to sacrifice the security of my documents and all of my hard work just to use Showbiz Scheduling.

I have been writing with Celtx and I have had very few complaints. So I decided to give Celtx a try for prep on this project. With the recent release of Celtx 1.0, I figure it’s time to put it to the test as a real pre-production tool. It makes it easy that Broken Promise is only seven pages. If it works out smoothly, I’ll do prep on my upcoming feature with it.

The first step to ridding yourself of the inconvenience that is Final Draft is to open your script in said inconvenient application. Then save your script as an RTF file. Import that file into Celtx, and it should recognize all of your formatting. Here’s where I ran into a small glitch. There were a few instances where an action line got caught at the end of a line of dialog. It was formatted properly in the RTF, but went a little wonky on import. No big deal this time. It only affected the last two pages of the script, and was an easy fix. This may be a bigger issue with a feature length script. Or may be no issue at all. It could have been a formatting error somewhere else in the pipeline. I’ll have to test it with a longer script. I’ll get back to you with the results.

That’s it for now. The next step is the script breakdown.