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First peek: Final Draft 10

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A new version of the screenwriting software Final Draft for Mac and Windows has just been released. I was on the beta test program but still I’m going to call this a first peek: call it a full and frank review of the price rather than of the program itself.

The quick summary is that this is definitely the nicest version of Final Draft we’ve had and it does add new features but nothing that would make you pause with your mug of tea halfway to your open mouth. I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss the new features but we’ll come to know whether they’re good or just gimmicks when we’ve been writing scripts in the app.

Script formatting hasn’t changed since time began and the ways in which Final Draft speeds up that part of the job can only go so far. They’ve gone so far. It’s unlikely that there will be some enormous new feature that you must have but there is something that I want. I want Final Draft to stop betraying the fact that it’s written for both Windows and Mac: it has always felt lowest-common denominator, it has always felt like an ancient PC app.

Of course it’s great that the app is on both platforms, the problem is that doesn’t feel as if it’s on either: it previously hasn’t kept up with Microsoft or Apple’s operating system.

Final Draft 10… still can’t quite shake that. Oddly, although the Mac version does still look like a Windows app, it’s still not as ugly as the actual Windows version.

It’s better. It’s getting there. And the reason for buying Final Draft at all remains how great it is at helping you zoom through a scene: forget writing out each character’s name in a fight, just write their line, trade their blow, hit return and give the other guy some words. This is the key part of the software, it is the key reason why it’s used: it means you can write down scenes just about as fast as you can hear them in your head.

If you don’t already have Final Draft, that would be the reason to get it. There are these new features, though. It is features, plural, as it really comes down to two. I’m being harsh: the makers would point to more but then they are obsessed with how Final Draft paginates and every time they boast about that, I think of how it is substantially less important than it was.

The two features that are worth examining begin with the story map. Sorry, Story Map(TM). They must be serious about it, they’ve trademarked it. Click on this and along the top of your screen where you might usually see a ruler, you get a timeline. Every scene has a mark on that time line and significant ones get bigger blobs. Click anywhere to go that screen. Or just look at the spacing between what you’ve said are the bigger blobby scenes.

Then there’s the Beat Board (also trademarked) which is to modern screenwriting what the cork board was to it before. If the cork board is for a single writer to plan out a single project, the beat board is more for a room of writers breaking a TV series.

That said, Final Draft still feels like an app for an individual, not a group. But there is now a collaborative feature: I’ve yet to test it out in anger or even really at all so I can’t tell yet whether it’s Google Docs-level collaboration. It’s certainly a way for many people to see the same script and exchange instant messages about it.

If you’re new to Final Draft then note that it retails for £188.40 ($249) but is temporarily on sale for £127.37 ($169. Education or military people can get some reduced price and upgrades can get version 10 for £75.36 ($99.99), temporarily reduced to £59.54 ($79.99). The reason for the odd Sterling price is Brexit. It will vary every time you look at it, but the trend ain’t going down.

You can buy the software from the official website where there is also a trial edition of both the Windows and Mac versions.

You can’t get a trial of the iPad and iPhone versions of either Final Draft Writer or Final Draft Reader. Never bother with Final Draft Reader. Just don’t. The Writer iOS app has been updated to work with Final Draft 10 features and if you already had it lurking away on your iPad or iPhone, you’ve just got the update for free. If you haven’t, then you need to buy and it costs approximately £23 ($29.99) temporarily discounted to £7.99 ($9.99). You can get this iPad and iPhone version here.

Lessons from being a director – part 3

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See the serious part 2 about delegation and also the power-mad-crazy part 1 about RULING THE WORLD.

How long do you think I can keep milking my directing career for productivity advice? I’m hoping I can carry on until the exciting day when I get my second-ever job as director.

But when you’re boring everyone about your power and artistic talent, you have to have more specific topics and now I have this one. Now I have realised this one: directing changes how you write.

Actually, it’s more than that: anything you do that is in some new way related to your writing or whatever your specific talent is, it changes.

I did rewrite the play on the fly to adjust for unforeseen problems, I did many, many times tweak to improve things based on the actors’ opinions. It’s common for writers to decry this but I would like to say right now that I am smug: I have always said that directors and actors should not make changes to a scene when it risks buggering up the rest of the script. Actors and directors are prone to concentrating on this scene right now, this scene you’re memorising, this scene you’re filming. And they should. They need to. Except when a brilliant suggestion that truly lifts that scene is an almighty bomb that ruins the entire point of the drama.

Granted, that’s a worst-case scenario.

I loved the whole process of directing but for me the whole process was in bringing that script to the stage. As short as it was, as specific as it was to this group, it had to be directed right and I had every syllable of that script in my head all the way through. Then I’d have multiple versions of the same scene in my head and I would be running them simultaneously.

None of which helps you, I just got carried away.

The action of doing something different in drama is the same, I think, as heading in to your home town from a new direction. There is one road into my home village in Birmingham that, for whatever reason, I rarely used as a kid. So now if I drive down there into the village, I come out into an entirely familiar world but it is entirely unfamiliar. The library is in the wrong spot. So is the school.

I reexamine them, I notice them again when I have become so used to them that I don’t.

So it was looking at this script from a new direction.

The short recommendation here is that you should go direct something. But the longer is that maybe you can find any way of looking at your story and your script that is different. Not better, not worse, just different. And see what it throws up at you, see what you notice.