Celtx – Scripting Software
I recently download a piece of software I’d heard about from a couple of artists in the webcomics community. It was a program called celtx and is used as a pre-production tool for film, audio-visual, theatre, audio plays, storyboards, and comic books. Since celtx is free to download and use, I had no hesitation about giving it a try. It has changed the way I write Reclaimer.
I’ve been using celtx for a couple of months now, and I couldn’t be happier with the program. Naturally, I use the comic book scripting utility of celtx, which has a drop-down bar at the top to let you switch between Page, Panel, Caption, Character, Balloon Type, and Balloon blocks in your script. The process is pretty seamless and smooth, and I’ve seen my pre-production times drop significantly. You can click on the screen capture to see a bigger version of an excerpt from a recent Reclaimer script in celtx.
Before celtx, I was writing out my scripts by hand in a Moleskine notebook. I actually type quite a bit faster than I write, though, so that a somewhat more arduous process for my pre-production. I found myself frequently skipping the pre-production entirely and writing the script at the same time I was building the day’s comic—and I think it frequently showed in the quality of my writing. What I really like about using celtx is that 1) it allows me to have my script already in hand when I capture my screenshots so I know just what images I need, and 2) this is probably my favorite aspect, it causes me to look at my script two or three times as I transfer each block of dialogue to the comic itself, thus allowing me to proofcheck and make edits on the fly to improve the quality of the writing further. I also include transcripts with all my comics now, and it’s a simple matter of copy-pasting the script from celtx into the transcript field for each comic (and cleaning it up just a little), thus saving me the time of having to type my hand-written scripts into the field each time.
I’ve become a big fan of celtx over the last couple of months, and I highly recommend it to anyone doing any work with comics, film-making, or other forms of scriptwriting. You can also pay $5 a month for a personal account on the celtx website where you can backup your scripts and share them with others for a more collaborative process. Give celtx a try and see if it doesn’t improve your writing quality and production times.