Celtx: Screenwriting For the Rest of Us

The spread of the internet has popularized free software. Before the internet, freeware tended to mean inferior. More specifically, before open source software. Nowadays, you can find software that is often a more than adequate substitute for pricey commercial applications. The Gimp and Open Office are the poster-boy applications of the free-generation.

Every software field seems to be catered for. In the screenwriting department, Final Draft is the commercial king but with eyes for a piece of its kingdom, is the open source application Celtx (pronounced Kel-tix by its developers but they don’t mind how you pronounce it) that is a cross-platform application built on the same engine as Firefox.

The developers describe Celtx as:

“Celtx (current version 0.9.8) is the first comprehensive software package designed for people who work in the Pre-Production of Film, TV, Video, Theatre and Animation. Celtx helps Creators bring their story ideas to life – combining intelligent writing and media planning tools with Internet friendly technologies to create a new, open standards platform for the pre-production of Media. It provides all of the tools you need under one application. Celtx is international too, it’s available in 20 languages.”

Features
Celtx is quite an extensive application that in my usage I only touched upon some of its features. Some of its key features are:

Script and Text Editors
Celtx has two editors: A script editor and a plain text editor that does support limited formatting, although is not a full rich text editor. The script editor uses industry standards so for instance, the Tab key alternate between Action and Character.

Items
Celtx provides a plethora of over 40 items that you can create. These include: Actors, Animals, CGI, Characters, Construction, Extras, Music, Props, Security, Sets, Sound FX, Stunts, Vehicles, Wardrobe and Weapons.

Each item has its own tailored form to fill in which greatly helps in both the generation of items (eg the Character item form asks about the character’s traits, motivation, description and background) and information management (eg the Location item form records address, contact information and facility information). Items can also have media files attached to them.

Special items are also available and include files (such as documents, spreadsheets and so on); web links; and schedules (which are iCal compatible).

Within the items lists, folders can also be created to allow grouping of items.

Tagging and Categories
Celtx lets you tag items in your script to categories. These categories are similar to the item list and allow you to generate reports that list scene by scene, all items required. These reports can be filtered by scenes, departments or items.

Collaboration
Celtx also provide online services for sharing and collaborating on your scripts.

Shortcomings

- The film screenplay is the only format/layout currently available, although the developer has said it is intending to add more .
- The plain text editor should be extended to support full rich text editing. Currently it only allows bold, underline, italics, and indenting. Hardly enough to get excited about, or write a novel or poem with it as the developers suggest. As a bare minimum, it should include changing fonts and attributes, alignments and line spacing.

Overall
When studying scriptwriting as a module of my writing course this year, I found Celtx to be an excellent tool for helping me get familiar with all the idiosyncrasies of scriptwriting and produce scripts that met with the layout requirements of my course.

Any sort of creative writing is soul-destroyingly difficult to crack into. However, having a tool like Celtx that makes the writing process easier is a great boon as it assures you will produce industry format scripts and it will help in the development of many facets of your project.

I can’t comment about Celtx in comparison to any other scriptwriting application, especially, Final Draft, but if you are a student or new to scriptwriting, Celtx is a great place to start. If you are experienced, have a look and keep an eye on Celtx, because as we’ve seen with Open Office, open source applications can rise to be worthy alternatives to commercial applications, and I think you’ll find Celtx is well down the track.