Screenplay Markdown Progress

The response to my Screenplay Markdown post has been wonderful. It’s a bit hard to follow the progress by reading the blog page, so here’s a brief recap.

I wrote about my recently discovered joy of working with plain text and Markdown, and that I’d concluded that a simple text file would not be such a bad way to begin work on a screenplay, given that Final Draft and many other screenwriting apps do a fine job of interpolating proper formatting from imported plain text documents.

Turned out I was not the only person to consider this, and some commenters called my attention to other plain-text-to-screenplay projects (post update 1).

This led to speculation about a simple syntax that would account for the few things not supported by plain text import/export, such as emphasis, dual dialog, title pages and and centered text.

This led to me going bananas and writing up a proposal for a plain-text screenplay format called SPMD (update 2), and creating a video mockup of how an app like Byword might soft-preview your screenplay formatting while you work (update 3).

The Byword guys tweeted about the video and got some excited responses from their followers.

Kent Tessman, creator of the Fade In screenwriting software (and its iOS companion, which I just learned of), wrote a detailed reply on his own blog. Other developers have emailed me privately and shared their valuable thoughts.

This has resulted in some changes to the spec, and to some real hope on my part that SPMD might becomes something useful someday. So if you’re at all interested, please take a look at the proposal, download the sample files, and let us know your thoughts.

Screenplay Markdown

Or: How I Fought The Battle With Usability and Lost, But Received Actual Productivity as a Consolation Prize

Thanks in no small part to the wise ramblings of Merlin Mann, I’m hooked on the portability and flexibility of doing as much of my creative work as possible using simple text files stored on Dropbox. Documents I’m working on are always accessible to me wherever I go. I can even apply useful formatting to these plain text files, regardless of which writing software I’m using, with the relatively intuitive syntax of Markdown. Markdown is, in the words of its creator John Gruber:

…a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

Apps like WriteUp on iOS and Byword on the Mac show me what my Markdown-formated text will look like in HTML. Here’s this very blog post in Byword — first the raw markdown text:

And here’s the HTML preview:

Because the files are plain text, there’s no way to mess up their contents or formatting by opening them in an incompatible app. The value of this has been made evident to me recently as I tried to live the Apple dream and bounce some work back and forth between Apple’s own Pages app on iOS and Mac. The file became bloated with unnecessary crap, formatting was removed, comments were deleted, and use of niceties such as curly quotes was inconsistent. I won’t even mention the hassles of manually emailing the document back and forth between devices, since Apple is actively solving that issue with iCloud. But iCloud won’t be so hot for Pages documents if the iPad version persists in stripping out critical formatting and features from documents created on the Mac.

Markdown solves all these issues by eschewing WYSIWYG and instead prioritizing something that, I’ve come to realize, might be far more valuable: keeping your hands moving on the keyboard.

The putzing-free fluidity with which I edit Markdown documents across devices has made me even more grumpy about the sorry state of mobile screenwriting. On iOS, I use two screenplay writing apps that support the industry-standard .FDX format: ScriptsPro and ScriptWrite. In all honesty, both have tremendous potential, and tremendous bugs. I’ve been skittish about using either for real work. Celtx Script, which I wrote about when it launched, is stable and lovely, but does not support FDX. Like Merlin (roughly) said in a recent episode of Back to Work, “I’m not going to row out to your island.”

Out of desperation for a mobile screenwriting solution that would be as fluid and flexible as my Markdown text work, I engaged in some procrasductivity the other night and began researching ways of writing a screenplay in plain text. After much fiddling, I finally remembered that Final Draft actually has a heuristic for guessing the implied screenplay formatting in a plain text file. If you feed it something like this:

It will correctly import it as this:

So the ultimate mobile screenwriting solution may be, for the time being, your favorite among the many lovely Dropbox-based plaintext writing apps out there.

Are other screenwriters as dissatisfied with their workflow as I am? Is there a part of your workflow where you’d give up WYSIWYG and accurate pagination to just get words on the page in a way that freed you from a specific device, and specific software? Or do we expect that Final Draft, Inc.’s promised-but-delayed iPad app will be what we’ve been wanting? Or that one or more of the existing iPad apps will become awesome?

Screenwriting is challenging enough that I often catch myself “fiddling” (in the Merlin Mann definition: spending more time putzing with the tools than doing the work) with ways of making it more visual and intuitive. And now here I am fiddling with a way of making it less visual for the sake of more portability.

Maybe I should just shut up and write. Which is exactly what I did after I got this all figured out. I put all the toys away and wrote a six-page treatment for a feature I want to make.

I wrote it in Markdown. And yesterday, as I was out walking my dog, I got an idea for a small tweak. I sat down on a bench in the sun, pulled out my phone, and made the adjustment while it was still fresh in my mind.

Awesome.

Update on Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 3:58PM by Stu

Apparently I’m either not crazy, or not the only crazy person out there. Turns out others have experimented with tools to enable plaintext screenwriting.

• Via @dansturm: screenbundle for TextMate
• Via @erichocean: eleanor
• Via @vilcans: screenplain

All seem to behave like Final Draft in interpreting plain text into a screenplay format. Which is nice, but it’s a one-way street. I’m thinking there might be a place for a plaintext screenplay format with markdown-like syntax, and a WYSIWYG desktop app that works with that format as easily as FDX.

The syntax would be necessary for special cases, such as forcing a Scene Heading element even when the first characters are not INT or EXT, simultaneous dialog, title pages, and centered text for the all-important “THE END.” Markdown syntax would be used for **bold** and *italics,* but being screenwriters, we need _underlining_ too, and the ability to _**combine**_ them.

This way we could have the niceties of a dedicated desktop WYSIWYG app combined with the edit-anywhere flexibility of plaintext.

Update on Thursday, August 11, 2011 at 2:45PM by Stu

And now I really am crazy, because you can view the Screenplay Markdown sytnax proposal here.

Update on Friday, August 12, 2011 at 11:10AM by Stu

And now there’s a video.

Celtx Script for iPhone and iPad

Kudos to Celtx for figuring out exactly what to include and what to leave out when designing a screenwriting app for mobile devices. Celtx Script (US$9.99) is the first iPad screenwriting app that “just works” in the way that Apple users expect. This is a welcome surprise given how clunky and homely the desktop Celtx application is on OS X.

Celtx Script on the iPad is as simple and elegant as one would hope. You can do most of what you need to just by typing. In portrait view you have a distraction-free view of your script. In landscape, there’s a handy scene list to the right for navigation.

Landscape view has a centering problem where the last character is cut off on the right. I trust that this is an easy bug to fix.

A feature I would love for both the iPad and the desktop version is folders in the scene list. Color-coding scenes would also be nice.

Notice how I praise the app for its minimalism and then request new features. See how difficult life is for developers?

Speaking of which, the developers were caught by surprise with Celtx Script hitting the App Store on a Saturday, so while the free Celtx Sync function would work between an iPhone and an iPad running Celtx Script, there was no way to sync between the free desktop Celtx and your mobile device. One of the developers managed to get the free syncing plug-in posted within a few hours though. Once you get the plug-in installed, you can import a screenplay from the free cloud backup using desktop Celtx’s Script > Import Script > From iPhone/iPad menu item. There’s a corresponding Export option as well. It’s not quite the same thing as a true Google Docs-style cloud sync, but it’s close, and it’s free.

I would love some assurance from the Celtx team about the security of the cloud storage.

I’m delighted that someone finally made a solid and elegant screenwriting solution for the iPad. That it works on the iPhone as well and syncs with free desktop software makes the $10 price a bargain.

Many folks asked why I ignored Celtx in my last screenwriting post. My answer was that it didn’t provide any features missing from my various other tools. That just changed in a big way.

Looking for screenwriting resources? You can follow my screenwriting list on Twitter, and check out my recommended screenwriting books at the ProLost Store.

The State of Screenwriting Software

Every day, those of us involved in film and video post-production use some truly amazing software. Applications that transcode video, present complex changes in real time, and allow us to transform our images from footage into filmmaking. We manage terabytes of data, we reverse-engineer camera motion by tracking a million moving details, and we create entire worlds using nothing but mouse clicks.

So I’m always a bit surprised at how what seems to be such a simple task by comparison, putting words on a page, has perennially been handled in a way dissatisfying to so many writers.

Final Draft

Final Draft ($249 MSRP, $186.68 from Amazon) is the gold standard, if you take that analogy in the direction of gold being an outdated, unwieldy encumbrance, the continued practical significance of which is more imagined than real. Every “real” screenwriter uses Final Draft, and Final Draft’s .fdx file format is as close to a lingua franca as exists in Hollywood.

Final Draft is an essential tool for films in production because of its industry-standard revision management and compatibility with popular scheduling software, but over the years it has often been less than a joy to use for actual writing. If you used it on a Mac, Final Draft was always the app that made you most painfully aware of Apple’s willingness to start fresh with a new operating system. Final Draft sometimes felt like it was running in an invisible Macintosh Plus emulator ported to Linux and running in OS X’s X11 environment. Even as recently as version 7, Final Draft would only sporadically display screenplay text with an anti-aliasd font.

In fairness, the current version 8, which I was just forced to upgrade to thanks to Snow Leopard, is pretty good. It’s aesthetically minimal and feels like a good, native Mac app. But without wanting to discount the many complex features that Final Draft has under the hood, let’s remember that its main task is to place the letters that you type on the screen, and format them like a script—which, by definition, excludes anything not possible using a 100-year-old typewriter. Even in version 8, some aspects of this simple task remain buggy. I find that I can wind up with lower-case letters in a character name depending on the mood of the (admittedly quite handy) auto-complete feature. Similarly, I don’t know if it’s a feature or a bug that I can occasionally type lower-case letter into a Scene Heading.

But the thing that absolutely flabbergasts me about Final Draft is that, after all these years, it still reflects not one ounce of understanding of how screenwriters think about organizing their work.

Almost every screenwriting application has a “notecards” feature, where scenes are displayed as virtual 3x5” notecards that can be color coded, annotated, and rearranged. This is meant to to emulate the age-old screenwriter’s practice of avoiding actual work by dicking around with 3x5” notecards.

The problem is that Final Draft, like most screenwriting apps, assigns one notecard to each slugline, rendering the entire idea completely worthless. When writers use cards, they might break things down as far as one scene per card — but a scene usually contains multiple sluglines.

In this single page from The Bourne Supermacy (Tony Gilroy, Brian Helgeland screenwriters), there are five sluglines. Every page in this tense action scene is like this—cross-cutting between Bourne and the Treadstone assassin, moving from setting to setting, punching in for crucial details. In Final Draft, each of these sluglines becomes an index card:

Which is not at all how a writer would use cards. This entire eight-page scene would probably be one card called “CAR CHASE - KIRIL TRIES TO KILL BOURNE.” Or, for another writer, maybe the chase would be broken up into a few cards. BOURNE SEARCHES THE BEACH TOWN FOR MARIE, CAR CHASE - KIRILL PURSUES BOURNE AND MARIE, KIRIL SETS UP HIS RIFLE, etc.

The point is, sluglines and index cards have nothing to do with one another. In order for index cards to be of any use, they must be able to contain an arbitrary amount of screenplay.

Which brings us to…

Scrivener

I’m skipping over Movie Magic Screenwriter…  oh wait, let’s not skip them entirely—just take a gander at this screenshot, which I just today pulled from their website. Wow. Anyway, on to Scrivener—the best screenwriting application in existence, and without even trying to be.

Scrivener ($39.95) is a Mac-only app developed by a frustrated novelist who wanted a better writing tool for himself. He does all the coding himself and you can expect a prompt reply from him on his company’s forum if you have ideas for improvements or if you’ve found a bug.

I know, crazy.

The catch is that Scrivener is a general-purpose writing app, with a few screenwriting features thrown in. It offers the basic formatting features, but makes no attempt at street-legal pagination, or managing a character list, or tracking revisions.

Which is so great, because it lets you Just Write.

I could write a hundred love letters to Scrivener, but the one feature I’ll focus on today is the notecards. They are notecards done right. You can—get this—put as much or as little script in one notecard as you like. I never would have dreamed we even had such revolutionary technology.

Not only that, but you can have nested sets of cards. A card can contain more cards.

Whoah.

If that sounds like files and folders, then you’re getting it. In fact, the best feature of Scrivener’s notecards is that you don’t have to view them as notecards. You can always see them as a hierarchy of folders on the side of your screen.

What you see here is the method of screenplay organization described in Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat. While everyone agrees on Acts I, II and III (yes, they do), different writers have different ways of breaking up what happens in each act. Scrivener lets you nest as many folders deep as you like, creating your own template, which you can load in at the start of a new project. At every nesting level, the folders can also be viewed as cards.

What this buys you is the ability to organize by cards at a high level and at a macro level—where cards become scenes. Real scenes, not sluglines. Scenes the way a writer thinks about scenes.

It’s so awesome that it takes a little time to get used to, but it’s worth it.

The only problem is that at some point, if you’re writing a real screenplay that will be read by real people, you have to leave the Scrivener party, put on a tie and maybe even pants, and show up for work at Final Draft. You need pagination. You need revision tracking. You need MOREs and CONTINUEDs (I guess). I respect Scrivener’s stated goal to not allow their creative writing app to sprawl into a full-fledged movie production tool. Scrivener is for writing. And man, it works. It’s almost like the guy who created it is a writer or something.

So I write this in the hope that Final Draft takes a stab at a folder or notecard system that makes one lick of sense. If you don’t, someone else will. In the meantime, I’ll continue to work in Scrivener for as long as I can before sobering up and looking around for where I left my pants.