Celtx does more than just practically write your script for you (well, it's not that easy, some creative effort is required on our part, but this software makes scripting much easier). This chapter gives us the VIP overview and a tour of Celtx's powerful writing features.
To simplify, it's about assistants.
In this chapter, we will:
- See how Celtx assists us in developing important parts of our story such as props, characters, and thirty-six other production categories.
- Experience the ways in which Celtx takes care of stuff that otherwise slows the writing process down, such as intuitive formatting and easy shortcuts.
- Learn to "write once, use many" with Celtx's Adapt feature.
- Visit the power of the Typeset feature, which automatically formats our scripts to industry standards, whether going to paper or to a PDF file (Portable Document Format), which, more and more, is becoming the way agents, managers, and producers want to receive finished scripts.
- Play with the reversible color-coded electronic Index Cards. You flip the card on the screen to type notes and color-code them to follow plot lines. You can also drag-and-drop them to move scenes around.
Learn how Celtx can track revisions for us.
- Use the Template Engine to create and save new project types. While Celtx provides you with the industry standard formats mentioned above, you are not limited to them.
By the end of this chapter, we will have a good grasp of all the preceding features and more that Celtx packs into itself to help us write.
Celtx assists in developing important parts of our story such as characters, props, and thirty-six other predefined production categories.
As this old writer learned decades ago, stories are about people. So, we'll jump ahead this once (at least) and look at how Celtx helps create and then track characters and other categories needed in production. Having defined characters makes writing scripts a great deal easier.
Now is a good time to emphasize that while this book is a beginner's guide to learning and using Celtx, it also features many tips about creating scripts and what to do with them after they are written.
Tip
Before starting a script, create the major characters by giving them brief biographical histories and motivations to be in the story (like why he or she would risk their lives instead of just running away). Do these for both the good guys and the bad guys; even bad guys need a reason to do what they do.
Now, let's look at some examples of using Celtx to track people, animals, props, and other items in our movies.
Of the several aids to writing built into Celtx, the Master Catalog is one of the more powerful features that track information about characters for us along with other useful categories.
In a shooting script, a lot more detail is called for and the Master Catalog tracks props, vehicles, extras, livestock (a cowboy got to have his horse), and all the other stuff a producer and/or director need to know. For a spec script, do not worry about tracking anything except characters for ease in writing. Agents who sell and producers who buy do not want that kind of detail. They will kick back scripts that have it. Just give them the story.
Okay, let's get to it.
Start Celtx and, on the "Welcome to Celtx" Splash Page, and under Project Templates, click on Film. An empty project for writing a motion picture screenplay appears. We explore creating projects and saving projects in detail in Chapter 5, but you may want to save this project if, as we go through the following example, you create characters you want to keep.