March 1st, 2014 | by KT | screenwriting
Mar
01
The topic of screenplay pagination has come up a few different times in a few different places recently. No, really, it has. The explanation of things from Fade In’s point of view has been sitting half-typed on my laptop for a couple of weeks, so I thought I’d get it finished up and posted here.
February 8th, 2014 | by KT | screenwriting
Feb
08
On John August and Craig Mazin’s Scriptnotes podcast, a recent subject of discussion was screenwriting software development. They solicited feedback from listeners, which got me, as a listener who has a little experience with the subject, thinking about a few things for which I could possibly provide some additional clarification and particularity.
January 3rd, 2014 | by KT | screenwriting
Jan
03
Happy New Year!
But maybe I should stop doing this. If I really wanted to keep things short (and yet still completely accurate), this year’s State of the Screenwriting Software Art could be something along the lines of: “Not a whole lot has changed from last year.” And if I wanted to get extra wordy: “Or the year before that.” With the exception of Fade In, no other professional screenwriting software has seen a whole lot of new in recent years.
December 29th, 2013 | by KT | screenwriting
Dec
29
I made Fade In because I just didn’t think Final Draft was good enough anymore. And so Fade In, as part of striving to be the best possible screenwriting software, takes what Final Draft is doing wrong and does it right. Here are just a few things from that list.
February 7th, 2013 | by KT | screenwriting
Feb
07
I’ve done this a couple of times now — sat down annually to summarize the state of the art in screenwriting software — and it’s not completely off-topic to wonder just what the point is, especially to do it as often as every year. After all, the 12-point Courier screenwriting format has existed pretty much unchanged since the first caveman banged out the first screenplay and went looking for an agent.
A fair point, maybe. But. While the screenplay format may well be the one single constant in human history, everything else changes.
September 4th, 2012 | by KT | screenwriting
Sep
04
Last week Final Draft finally released its iPad-only Final Draft Writer, and announced that its regular price would be $49.99.
That $50 price tag for an app is pretty awesome. Not nearly as awesome as it would’ve been if Final Draft had the balls to ask a thousand dollars for it, but…pretty awesome all the same.
April 27th, 2012 | by KT | movies
Apr
27
Granted, there aren’t as many bankruptcies in the industry as there were in the going-bust heyday of ten years ago or so — there just aren’t as many theater chains left — but those that are still standing are, well…they’re surely wondering just how the hell they’re going to stay in business for the long run, even with huge crowds still packing in to see the latest blockbusters, of which, these days, a new one seems to open every weekend.
I’m going to tell you why they’re not:
Movie theater chains are going out of business because they’re no longer any good at what they’re supposed to be in business doing.
February 12th, 2012 | by KT | screenwriting
Feb
12
There were a couple of discussions about Fountain here and there in the last few days, and one thing that came up was how a plain-text format screenplay was futureproof and therefore safer for long-term storage than a proprietary binary format.
That’s the reason that Fade In uses Open Screenplay Format.
February 8th, 2012 | by KT | screenwriting
Feb
08
A couple of years ago, screenwriter John August came up with an easy, straightforward way to incorporate script excerpts into web pages and blogs and forum posts. With a little simple formatting, plain text would be automatically formatted to look like a screenplay. John called it Scrippets.
I thought that was a cool idea, so I put support for it in Fade In.
January 23rd, 2012 | by KT | screenwriting
Jan
23
Not quite twelve months ago I wrote about finally giving up, once and for all, on Final Draft as a tool for screenwriting. I also wrote about what were, for me, the shortcomings of any potential alternatives.
Now, almost a year later, it’s interesting to see how much — or how little — has changed.
© 2014 Kent Tessman