For everyone who finds the mechanics of screenwriting to be evil drudgery, you can rejoice, sing, and dance in the streets.
Crack open a cold browser and head over to http://celtx.com/ and download away.
The fine folks at Celtx have re-engineered Firefox and Thunderbird software cores into an attractive, open-source, freely downloadable screenwriting program!
To get a quick view of what Celtx can do for the screenwriter, view the short tutorial on script editing within Celtx here: http://celtx.com/walkthru/script_ed.html
Celtx intuitively handles the dirty work of correctly formatting Scene Headers, Actions, Characters, Dialogs, and much more.
Celtx also goes several steps further, by helping directors and other crew manage all the related items needed to take a screenplay off the page and get a movie out of it.
You can move through scenes and build sidebar databases of costumes notes, sound effect notes, sotryboards, screen caps and more.
This way, the screenplay becomes a total framework for managing everything needed to create a finished movie.
Celtx even includes the Lightning calendar addon for Thunderbird, integrated as a shooting schedule manager.
Celtx also has an integrated upload/download feature that can be used for collaborative work.
Personally, I am not sure I want my screenplays uploaded through someone else's service (where it could be harvested without my knowledge). Personally, I prefer a collaboration engine like the one in Gobby, but, including collaboration in Celtx nicely rounds its capabilities out.
Overall, Celtx is a very, very nice program for the SL Machnimist and could easily act as the project hub that drives the entire production effort.
Best of all, its free, which compares very nicely to the industry standard tools running hundreds or thousands of dollars.
I have already poured my latest project (working title SELENIA) into Celtx to put it through a live-fire trial, and its doing very well. It instantly recognized my "homebrew" style and reformatted it into something that looks professional enough to take to Hollywood.
It found all of my slug lines and made independent scene breaks out of them, so I could dra g and drop and everything... and I didn't even have to ask it to. And it got the scene breaks CORRECT even though my personal screenplay style is NOT industry formatted?!?
Wow.
So, no more excuses and whining that screenwriting is too hard.
Like the Death Star, Celtx handily removes large problems that keep YOU from dominating your universes.
I personally do not like to focus on the formatting because it breaks my creative flow.
I would rather focus on the story, and let Celtx handle the formatting as I go.
Celtx is worth the very small investment in time and effort it will take to download and learn it. The screencast tutorial walkthrough above is a must to get going quickly.