By Gordon Meyer

P3GizmoGuy@gmail.com

I’m reluctantly dating myself when I concede that I wrote my very first screenplay using the original Microsoft Word for DOS and printed the thing out on a 19 CPS daisy wheel printer.  That 124 page masterpiece took over 5 hours to print and I had to babysit the entire process in order to make sure the form-feed paper didn’t jam up my printer.

Although setting the standard screenplay margins within Word for DOS wasn’t a big deal, every time I revised the script, I had to manually go through the script and adjust each and every one of those 120 + page breaks. And then came dedicated script writing software and writers everywhere bowed to the techno-geniuses who made their lives so much easier.

As far as I’m concerned, in the professional world, there are basically three choices for dedicated screenwriting programs: Final Draft (www.finaldraft.com), Movie Magic Screenwriter (www.screenplay.com) and Scriptware (www.scriptware.com), all three of which are available for both Windows and Mac.  All three programs boast A-List writers in both features and television as their users.  Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter recently released new versions.

The core idea behind pretty much every screenwriting program worth considering is to make the mechanical part of writing (i.e. correct formatting and pagination) as much of a no-brainer as possible.  The early DOS based programs, while easier than adding custom templates to Word, Word Perfect or WordStar (the reigning word processors of the day), they still were pretty cumbersome with their heavy use of function keys for thinks like dialog formatting.

Then came Scriptware.  Here, you only needed to learn to use two keys – Tab and Enter.  Want to insert a piece of dialog?  Just hit the Tab key (as if you’re on an old fashioned typewriter) and Scriptware would automatically put your cursor where it needed to be for a character name, even remembering to put the name in all caps.  Hit Enter after the character name and you’re in the correct position and formatting for the dialog itself.  Every major screenwriting program since has adopted this user interface.

I have to admit up front a certain bias in that I started with Scriptware.  Right now, I’m using Final Draft for the re-writes of my swashbuckling fantasy adventure saga (agent and producer inquiries welcome).

But Movie Magic Screenwriter’s latest addition not only includes what they call “educational templates” to coach you through the creative process for a variety of formats, they recently created a template from author Michael Hauge, the author of “Writing Screenplays That Sell.”  I’ve known Michael for years and taken several of his classes, so this addition intrigued me.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be putting each of these programs through their paces with as open a mind as I can muster.  Each program boasts a fairly easy learning curve for the basics and lots of useful tools to make the writer’s job easier.  It will be interesting to see which I like best by the time I finish my testing.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.