Screenwriting software.

Back in the olden times, when people wrote movie scripts with typewriters, I can only imagine that properly formatting a screenplay was tedious at best. (If you’re not familiar with what a screenplay looks like, check out this NoFilmSchool.com article that explains how screenplays are formatted and why they are formatted that way.)

When I first started writing screenplays in the early 2000s, software was available to make the process easier. But the industry standard, Final Draft, was famously expensive. And the competition wasn’t cheap.

Chuck and I won a copy of Movie Magic Screenwriter at an early Sidewalk Film Fest. (I think it was called “Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000” at the time, because back then all the software companies were appending a “2000” to the end of whatever they named their software.) I am pretty sure I wrote Hide and Creep using that software. I guess if we hadn’t won that, I would have written it in Word and manually put in all the weird tabs and spacing that the screenplay format requires. (I am struggling to remember what software I used when I wrote the script for our first short film, The Seven Year Switch. I obviously should have done a better job keeping up with that early Crewless stuff.)

These days, there are thankfully a lot of screenplay apps available, and many of them are cheap or even free. My favorite isn’t so much an app as it is a standard. It’s called Fountain. You can read more about it on the Fountain website, but the short explanation is that it allows you to write your screenplay using any plain text editor (I like BBEdit on the Mac and Bear on the iPad) and then convert that to a properly formatted PDF later.

I usually use Highland on the Mac to do the PDF conversion. But I was working on a short screenplay while traveling recently and didn’t have my Mac handy. I checked the Fountain site and found a link to Afterwriting, an online Fountain screenplay app. I copied my text to Afterwriting and was able to quickly convert it into a nice PDF.

If you’re a screenwriter and you aren’t working on a big production that’s tied to Final Draft (even though there are a lot of good screenplay apps available today, Final Draft is still the industry standard), Fountain is definitely worth a look.