Amazing Discovery!

Hey Jesse Ilg again for Crush TV. Recently I've been going over the scripts for Total Drama Gonudie Island and have been doing some re-writes and finding ways to shorten the scripts from epic numbers such as 48 pages! To 36 or even 38. During this I decided to check out Final Draft 8 and found out how to use the Duel Dialog function! Now making my scripts shorter has become way easier as all my overlapped dialog doesn't take up half a page but now instead a quarter of a page, but that doesn't make the process any less tasking or easier. For any writers who are interested in writing screenplays for Animated Cartoons or Live Action I'd suggest two programs to you, the first is free and is called Celtix.

Celtix is good for beginners and has an easy interface and gives you industry standard script format scripts. In the word of writing one page in a script can equal one minute of screen time. I consider Celtix the easier one to use as it has a more user friendly interface and has everything presented to you easily.

Final Draft is for advanced users who want to be using the industry standard program for writing. This program takes some time to get used to as I picked it up after almost ten minutes if middling around with it. This program is literally identical to Celtix but lets you change the default industry standard to what ever you want. I haven't really played around with Final Draft 8 that much but to my understanding you can color code certain elements whether that be certain characters to important pieces of dialogue/action. I could see this being useful when you have two different groups of characters or multiple groups of characters and you want to keep track of which characters are with who. Like I said I haven't really played around with it that much but I'm sure it's features help with the planning and writing of a script.

Sadly if you started off using celtix and wanna tranfer your writing over to Final Draft 8 there is no way of doing this, even copy and paste breaks the script format from Celtix to Final Draft.

So for those starting out writing I would say get your hands on a copy of Final Draft 8 just for the fact that this program is the professional and industry standard. If you can't afford Celtix or dont have the means of acquiring it I would just download Celtix for free and start writing using that program.

Good luck with your writing and if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment and I'll see you guys next time.