Film software is EXPENSIVE, or at least it used to be. Some of it still is, that's fine, Final Draft and Movie Magic/EP Budgeting and Scheduling will probably always be expensive, and there'll always be big productions willing and happy to spend money.
With the digital revolution, film budgets plummeted, and smaller, lighter film productions started to spring up. Productions with less gear, less people, less money. I personally have found the internet to be invaluable, and really enjoyed the options offered by Celtx.
We have a couple of seats for Movie Magic in the office and I've used it before. I really like it, it's very well-designed, but it costs a fortune, and these days paying that much for software just isn't really heard of. Enter Celtx.
Intended to replace Final Draft (screenplay writing) and Movie Magic (scheduling and budgeting), Celtx is a pre-production and development suite. It doesn't handle budgeting (yet, anyway) but is very effective at both scheduling and scriptwriting. It's nicely laid out, reasonably fast, open-source and (this is the best part) it has strong web integration.
With Celtx 1.0 you could sign into your Project Central account and all of your projects would be up there - you could easily share them with other Celtx users (signup takes about 30 seconds) and it's designed to make collaboration a breeze.
Now, the system wasn't perfect...only one person could be updating at a time, it wasn't really scaleable over three people in my experience, but it was still an attempt at a solution, and a free one. It was designed to avoid all of the inevitable e-mails that come with script and scheduling revisions, meant to take some of the pain out of it, and even if you only had three people updating the files - director, writer and 1st AD, you could have some passive users like Art Dept, Costume, PM, AD Dept. and producer, who could still benefit from having one central place to check up on the project. The pages looked like this:
Quite nice.
If you had the client, you could download the project file and make changes. It was all a little kinky (not in the good way, in the way that there were kinks to be worked out) but it was a start.
Celtx 2.0 has just been released and now the online service is paid subscription only. This is such a stupid move - especially in an industry that's so focussed on getting the most out of any situation. People would sooner pirate a copy of MM or FD than pay for Celtx, doesn't matter if it's a fiver or fifty - it's still not as good as Movie Magic or Final Draft, and if you're going to spend money on a software package, you may as well spend it well.
I really hope that they go back and change their minds on this one, they showed so much promise! If they don't then they'll be sunk by someone who steals their ideas and does it better, for free.
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