Sometimes technology provides obvious tools, necessary, but because they have some alternative with similar capabilities they end up being little known and practically nobody uses them.
This is the case of software products designed for screenwriters. Word processors allow you to write scripts, of course. However, there are some formatting features in the universe of words that are written for television, film or video.
Not many people know that there are special word processors for screenwriters, which include various special features to help them with their work and that incorporate a large number of standard formats so that there is no need to align, column, separate scenes or paginate by hand.
The best known of these products is the Final Draft, developed by the company of the same name. What can a product of these do by the screenwriter? A lot of things. For example, keep a record with character names, locations, scene headings, and other repetitive things. In this way, it is enough to type one or two letters so that the complete text that you want to write appears. Other benefits are the tools to generate revisions, leaving changes clearly marked and automatic pagination, which formats scene continuations without touching anything. It incorporates templates and settings so that you do not have to think everything from scratch (a very important help in particular for those who are just entering these lides) and handles production concepts, such as scene numbering, pages A and B and multiple revisions.
Among its technical features are its ability to import text files from the most common processors on the market and the possibility of exporting the material to different formats, including the PDF standard. Text-to-speech is a must, a functionality that reads the entire script by assigning a different voice to each character.
Is it really necessary?
Those lovers of the old Word, who like to tap the Tab keys, assemble tables and columns and run with the space bar until the texts are aligned and instead may wonder if it is really necessary to have this type of software.
The answer is linked directly to the volume of text that each professional writes. "Serial writers" can take advantage of such a tool to maximize their time. Also those who produce a lot of video material and who need to generate small scripts for them can see some utility in this software. Screenwriters who work in groups have many advantages with this tool, such as the ability to work online with the same script at the same time, to share the texts or to make quick revisions or comparisons of complete scripts in seconds. It also has collaboration tools, so that different professionals can check a text together in real time through the internet.
But the truth is that if you are going to write a script for the only time or if you perform this task very infrequently, perhaps the investment is not justified. If it is not given an intensive use, it can even be more time spent learning to use the software (although, it is worth clarifying, they usually have a fairly intuitive graphical interface) than that gained thanks to automatic formatting and the other functional features mentioned.
Some professionals claim that they have reduced their screenwriting time considerably using this type of tool instead of a regular word processor. Idle time that can be used to generate a better plot...
What surely this type of software can not do is avoid the dislikes that we often give ourselves when we go to the cinema and have to "endure" movies with terrible scripts. But at least, for sure, they were neatly presented.
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