Product Review: Page (1) of 1 - 04/02/07

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Digital production, from pre-production to on-set shooting, to the edit suite, has quickly approached an age of maturity and evolved complexity. Like so many elements of contemporary media production, this maturity is evidenced by the conceptual and technical sophistication of the tools by which movies are made.

True enough, yet for myself after more than a decade of using, reviewing and analysing software tools of all kinds across all sectors of cinematic production technology, its hard not to be somewhat jaded, or at the very least, decidedly difficult to impress anymore.

It would seem that with this maturity of the tools comes a complacency and a sense of ongoing progress and improvement stilted and stifled. Unable to move forward and think laterally, production software development is seemingly compounded by a corporate desire to maintain an economically rewarding status quo of minimal progression and, simultaneously, continue to release and sell regular new software versions regardless of developmental inspiration. Thus so many media software production tools have become bloated and inflated like an artificial economic boom without a base of actual resources.

So it is, from this position of being increasingly unimpressed with new software releases, that Celtx enters the picture. This pre-production development application presents itself as not just a tool but an holistic process and perspective on digital production that is so thoroughly fresh, so vibrant that it may just re-inspire a faith in the ability for software tools to advance possibilities, open opportunity and facilitate creativity itself.

More than just a system of useful and functional tools and components for scripting, narrative development and production planning, Celtx goes much further. Celtx represents a proactive engagement with new and challenging conceptualizations of not only what a software can do but how software technology can be conceived, developed and implemented. In so doing it holds the vast potential to put traditional software developers on notice that there are more forward-thinking development processes on the table.

Celtx is built from the outset to be a comprehensive and broad-ranging pre-production tool. In a market were post-production tools abound but pre-production is under nourished, this alone is a welcome prospect. Moreover, where many current tools for scripting and pre-production are singular in their scope, focusing on particular elements, Celtx seeks to unify creative, technical and logistical components of cinematic construction and indelibly treat the screenplay and its processes as more than just description and dialogue.

To begin with Celtx is an open source project lead by Canadian-based Greyfirst software. Being open-source the Celtx software itself is completely free to download and use by anyone that wishes to. Moreover the open-source framework means Celtx as been contributed to by, and developed in conjunction with, an enormous diversity of writers, film-makers, producers and software programmers all over the world and wears this universality on its sleeve being available in more than 24 languages.

It would be a mistake to say that Celtx is 'foremost' a screenplay formatting and writing application as this would be to fail to recognize the much bigger holistic and non-hierarchical approach Celtx presents for Pre-production, but certainly it is script writing process that is central to Celtx's functionality.

Celtx works to international standard screenplay elements - slugline headings, action, dialogue, character and includes support for standard shooting-script page continuations, 'MORES' & 'CONTS' and parentheticals. Each of the elements can be selected and applied either before or after a line of text has been written and of course changed at will.

For any writer, not least of all the screenwriter, maintaining the flow of ideas is crucial so applying and working to complex formatting needs to be as efficient as possible and not distract from the main task. In this regard Celtx uses a range of pre-emptive text functions that guess the completion of words, character names and scenes. To its credit this system in Celtx is cleverly and subtly applied and so avoids the annoying persistence many similar tools are prone to.

Celtx overview

Swapping script element types (character title, dialogue, action description) that each carry there own formatting, is also very simply applied with either the TAB key to move between elements or number pad keys to select any of the elements available. Celtx takes care of all formatting ensuring that each scene element conforms to correct spacing and indentation. More importantly Celtx tracks and automates all numbering of both scenes and pages.

This numbering is tightly linked with a variety of other Celtx elements especially the scene manager. Here entries for each scene are automatically created as you write them in the script and provides overview access to all scenes and their order. Scenes can be simply clicked and dragged to reorder them in the script and all numbering adjusted automatically.

With this set of script functions alone, Celtx is performing in a powerful, free and open source package what other commercial tools charge hundreds of dollars for. That alone is enough to get most media creators excited but what makes Celtx really special is the superb double act it performs in not only facilitating the pragmatic and logistic elements of scripting and pre-production but also supporting the creative development process itself. This is seen most evidently in the Story and Character development tools Celtx provides.

Any character named in the screenplay can be tagged with a Character sheet. This is a separate screenplay element page that provides fields for detailing and planning characters. Name, age, appearance are obvious components but Celtx prompts the writer towards a deeper consideration of the character with fields to detail Character wants and aims, the role in the narrative ad their importance to particular scenes. Media files can be loaded  - stills, sounds even video clips - and the very succinct detail and deliberate questioning of this page becomes a very powerful planning tool. Similarly sheets can be generated for each scene to plan not just logistics of location but also map and enter data on the role of the scene and its key purpose in the narrative. All these entries are subsequently linked back to the screenplay itself (and into the underlying database that is the basis of Celtx) with drag and drop fields for including what scenes a character or location appears in.

Celtx character plan

As the old writer's mantra goes, 'there's no such thing as good writing only good re-writing', and Celtx takes this to heart with substantial options for annotation, revision and collaboration. Celtx provides two main tools for this - the first is the scratchpad. Designed to function just as a notepad beside the computer keyboard, the scratchpad is a universal text editor, not linked to any script element but openly able to be called up as a pop-up window at any time and for text notes to be cut, copied and pasted between scratchpad and script. By contrast the second option, where you wish to make notes directly into the screenplay itself, Celtx provides note tags which can be applied with automatic time and date to specific screenplay points and are fixed to the specific part of the script text they are applied to.

The open source structure and directed collaborative development nature of Celtx ensures that the product as an ability to adapt, expand and include new features on a much faster and flexible time-scale than traditional tools on a corporate commercial model. One such feature that Celtx users clamoured loudly for was integrated storyboarding tools; and this prayer has been answered in the most recent version of Celtx.

Whilst not a drawing or image creation tool itself the Celtx storyboarding facility is a highly effective storyboard creation and management system that allows for all manner of still photos and scanned drawings to be imported, annotated, arranged into sequences with simple drag and drop to construct highly functional storyboards. Completed cell sequences can then be printed and exported or presented in a slick pre-visualization mode that automates the playback of each frame image in sequence with notes.

Celtx storyboard

This feature is incredibly useful and points directly at Celtx's integrated approach to pre-production. However, being a new addition to Celtx the storyboard mode still feels somewhat under developed, most notably there is no way yet to map storyboard cells to scenes in the screenplay. But with the ever adapting and evolving nature of the software's development it is undoubtedly a matter of time before we see storyboarding in Celtx grow into its enormous potential.

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Mike Jones is a digital media producer, author, educator from Sydney, Australia. He has a diverse background across all areas of media production including film, video, TV, journalism, photography, music and on-line projects. Mike is the author of three books and more than 200 published essays, articles and reviews covering all aspects of cinematic form, technology and culture. Mike is currently Head of Technological Arts at the International Film School Sydney (www.ifss.edu.au), has an online home at www.mikejones.net and can be found profusely blogging for DMN at www.digitalbasin.net