Kent Tessman

The state of the screenwriting software art: 2013 edition

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.

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Mobile screenwriting revisited

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.

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Why your movie theater is going out of business

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.

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Open Screenplay Format

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.

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Fountain

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.

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The state of the screenwriting software art: 2012 edition

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.

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Dual dialogue: you’re doing it wrong

September 18th, 2011 | by KT | screenwriting

Sep
18

Dual dialogue — i.e., dialogue positioned in two columns side-by-side to indicate two characters speaking simultaneously — is another in the list of things that modern screenwriting programs do pretty badly.

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Screenwriting Markdown at work

September 8th, 2011 | by KT | screenwriting

Sep
08

Fade In Professional Screenwriting Software and Fade In Mobile both now have preliminary support for the previously discussed Screenplay Markdown format, or SPMD.

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Notes on Screenplay Markdown

August 13th, 2011 | by KT | screenwriting

Aug
13

(Or, rather, Some Longish and Somewhat Technical Notes on Screenplay Markdown.)

Stu Maschwitz recently wrote about using Markdown syntax for screenplay formatting. Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for writing for the web, originally designed by John Gruber a few years back and now not uncommon as a formatting aid in online forums and other software.

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Mobile screenwriting

July 10th, 2011 | by KT | screenwriting

Jul
10

I’ve spent the last couple of months, in between working on new film projects, on getting the mobile version of Fade In ready for release — mainly working around different platform behaviours and toolkit shortcomings.

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