Frank Jonen is a VFX freelance sup, experience designer,
photographer and writer / director.
A multi-hypenate of non-fixed career.
I’m kinda big on my tools playing well together, sometimes that requires doing some work of my own because no-one has done a tool for what I want to do, but so far it wasn’t a big deal yet. and I learned something on the way. So yeah, useful.
I’m using Scrivener and now Byword for story preparation and Final Draft for – wait for it – the final output. Lots of revisions of course, but I’m talking formatting here. Final Draft it where it ends before it goes to an iPad near you.
I really slimmed down my toolkit lately, replacing expensive database tools with small scripts and the standard MySQL installation my hosting company provides. For what I use it, MySQL is fine. It’s like a big spreadsheet with lots of cross-references and custom read-outs. Nothing scary really.
The Mac AppStore is tremendously useful here. It gives small new developers a change to get big. Since the store is so focused, it’s almost like an angel investment post launch. The sheer volume of sales makes apps at seemingly ludicrous prices possible. This race to the bottom is kinda scary, but that’s for another day.
The de-facto standard for scriptwriting in just about any sector of the entertainment industry. Robust feature set, fast and since version 8, a completely open file format.
Once I got my ducks in a row and once I know what the hell I am doing, it always goes to Final Draft. Once you have turned all of the UI off where you’re just looking at a page in a window it’s incredibly fluid, you just write, do the finger dance on the keyboard to move between character, dialogue, action and other elements. Once you got the keyboard shortcuts down it’s just very snappy.
It’s also the most expensive app here, but now with the 20% Discount you can get into the action with less pocket hurt.
Byword is the little big tool I’m using more and more since Scrivener started to just crash a lot with the latest updates. Also with Scrivener I have to wait for it to launch, Byword is just there. And yes my boot drive is an SSD. I like my stuff focused. Rather than getting a Swiss Army Knife that has every single tool at hand and I probably end up with the corkscrew in my wrist trying to cut a wire, I’d get the knives for the job at hand when I need them. Also big cost savings over time.
Scrivener is like my little fort, where all the characters and locations live in context to the story parts. Character / location sheets have links to our actor and location database on the server. It all kinda converges in Scrivener at the moment. Which is pretty nice. A simple php script takes the location and character names from a Final Draft FDX file and puts them into the database, so I can flesh them out from the iPad on the couch. All helps to take the stress out of things and get off the desk more often.
Byword is now my go-to tool for quickly capturing quick ideas. Learning Markdown was pretty essential there though. While I’d love to see a Screenwriting Markdown (SPMD) version like proposed by Stu Maschwitz, my current setup is very workable. And it’s a LOT less frustrating than using Microsoft Word for writing. Getting Byword and something like WriteUp on your iOS device for bed notes and random spurs is a really good idea I found.
PS: I wrote this post in Byword btw. Put it in Markdown mode and it just flies. :)
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