I just received an email from Celtx about their new 1.0 version of their open source screenwriting/ project management/ production coordination application – a film maker’s swiss army multimedia pre production tool that seems to address a lot of needs for you – the media maker – to author, visualize, and coordinate a production.
Holy cows with jet packs.
Call it the ultimate Youtube tool or the new wave of Hollywood – either way, it looks like Celtx is making a bold and concerted move into territory formally occupied almost exclusively by Screenplay Systems and Final Draft. The fact that its compiled for Mac/Linux/Windows with a dizzying array of language support makes it all the more appealing. This is the kind of open source evolutionary development that people that aren’t developers have heard about but rarely seen in non developer apps.
Where this nifty piece of software goes incredibly right is in its treatment of text – it thinks of text in terms a mutable format – you can re-purpose the text into properly formatted comic books, TV show scripts, film screenplays, plays, radio, and even web video – well, maybe not web video – cause whoever heard of a proper Youtube format, eh?
The real “killer app” though seems to be the community of storytellers that Celtx is bringing together on another of their sites – Celtx “Project Central“. This remarkable community site has a lot of promise for collaboration on content creation. The coupling of the media pre production functions to a standalone community portal is – to borrow a colloquialism of Bean Town – “wicked cool” (I only stoop to this because the Celtics are up 2-0 over the Lakers in the playoffs at the moment). Me likey!
The video above is a brief overview of the features new to Celtx as it comes out of Beta and into a 1.o release. Mike Jones, Head of Technological Arts at International Film School Sydney walks us through some of the features and things he likes. Thanks to Mike for the flick and extra thanks to the development community that put this nifty app and portal together!
~Drew
