Writing and a Software Update

Not much to report of late but Jason prompted me to post in a comment, so in a desperate attempt to hold on to the people who take the time to read this blog I'll give you an update.

During my trips to London I have been plugging away at 'Only in Dreams' on the train. This has involved some re-writing and some new pages and if I gauge things correctly, it should pan out at roughly 85 to 90 pages long. Currently I've got 55 pages (not continuous) putting the script at about 61 to 64% complete, so in short; I'm getting there.

I'm really not sure if what I've got works any more. It's something I've had running around in my head and on paper for such a long time that I don't think I can see the wood for the trees. I'm afraid that if I stop and take another step back I may never get it finished, so if I carry on to the end, I'll at least have something complete to fix.

In other news I've been participating as a beta tester for the new version of Movie Magic Screenwriter. After trying others I always fell back to MMS and I can say that this new version (version 6), is a vast improvement on version 4.x/2000, so users wanting to upgrade won't be disappointed. It brings into the software some basic outlining features. Up to now I'd been using another piece of software for that so I'm quite happy, plus it finally shows misspelled words with a red underline. For a bad speller like me I find that much easier as I can correct on the fly without having to fire up the spell checker like I did with the old version. I don't know where you can buy it in the UK (I haven't looked), but you can buy it on Amazon.com.

Anyway, I'm off to London again next week so the page count should creep up some more.

Later

C

The Great Screenwriting Software Extravaganza!

Extravaganza! Now there’s a word you don’t hear much any more.

Anyway, the people at Sophocles commented on one of my software posts suggesting I give their software a run for its money. In the interests of fairness I have downloaded the beta of their next version and will use it to write my new Rom-Com.

This means I and using MMS to do the re-write of Good Guys, FD for Only in Dreams, and now Sophocles for the Rom-Com.

The comparison won’t be posted until I have finished each one, and unfortunately that may take some time so please be patient.

Regards

C

Final Draft Demo

As promised I’ve downloaded the demo of Final Draft 7 and am writing my newest screenplay with it (see ‘Only in Dreams’ in the progress section on the right).

I won’t compare it with Movie Magic Screenwriter just yet, but there are some things it does better than MMS and some things it doesn’t.

I’ll post more later.

C

Movie Magic Screenwriter

I don't know if this is old news to any of you but Movie Magic Screenwriter 6.0 is out next month.

I've used MMS for what must be at least 5 years now after buying version 4.0. Updates have now moved this on to 4.7, but since then I've heard nothing about the next major version (I've no idea what happened to version 5).

I think Movie Magic is great. It has NEVER EVER CRASHED on me. It formats everything for me and saves/exports in enough formats; native, rtf, pdf, ASCII,and a ton of others. It will even convert to final draft version 4 format (although I'm sure no one uses version 4 anymore). The formatting is correct "out of the box" (as far as I know) and I've never had to touch any settings. The inline script notes are a great help and it even has the silly stuff like that talking robots to read your script back to you.

From what I've heard the "Final Draft industry standard" thing isn't as true as it used to be, and FD's support is infamous.

I have used both Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter before and MSS wins by a mile, however in the interests of fairness I will download the latest Final Draft demo and post back if I decide to eat humble pie :)

Either way I'm still looking forward to the upgrade.

Later

C