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The Best Final Draft Alternatives for Screenwriters. Final Draft is still the industry-leading screenwriting software, but to the newer writer the price tag can be a turn-off. Fortunately, gone are the days of wonky Word templates and manual margins.
Course Info
- Duration: 1h 53m 16s
- Skill Level:Beginner
- Released:July 13, 2017
- Viewers:6,858
Learn the most in-demand business, tech and creative skills from industry experts.
Course details
Writing scripts for the big or small screen is a dream for countless aspiring creatives. As communication has grown increasingly visual—and video technology has become increasingly accessible—the art and craft of screenwriting has found powerful additional uses in everything from politics to marketing to education. Final Draft 10 is a leader in the creation and revision of screenplays of all types. It's the go-to software for novices who want to use a pro tool, and veterans who have made it the standard.
This course is a step-by-step, interactive journey that takes the aspiring screenwriter—or the pro who hasn't yet used Final Draft—from zero to sixty. While it doesn't cover every feature of this powerhouse software, it offers an overview of 80% of the tools a writer needs to go from outline to, well, final draft. Highlighted are the latest cutting-edge features in version 10 that enable brainstorming, alternate versions of dialog, and more. Your guide, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Roger S.H. Schulman, also offers insider tips and tricks to save time and improve the quality of scripts, and a bonus chapter on using Final Draft Writer on the iPad or iPhone—to take scripts wherever inspiration strikes.Skills covered in this course
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Welcome
- [Instructor] I know you've heard the old saw that writing is rewriting. I know because I said it just a little while ago. But it doesn't mean that absolutely everything you write the first time around is destined for the garbage bin. Welcome to Revisions. Revisions are generally marked in screenplays for purposes of production. Everyone on the crew must know exactly what text in a newly issued page is new so they can make the appropriate production changes or just keep track. That's why Final Draft keeps most of its revision tools under the Production menu right here. But I've found these tools to be invaluable to the drafting process as well. You can take a new direction in your writing, confident that you can go backwards should you change your mind. If you're reviewing your changes, you don't have to waste time reading stuff you haven't changed, because all the new stuff is clearly marked. Final Draft keeps track of your changes automatically or manually, it's your choice. Whenever you've written something you want to mark as a revision, highlight it, then choose Mark Revised from the Production menu, or use the keyboard shortcut command + ]. The color of the text will change, and the all-important asterisk, or star, appears in the margin. Any change, addition, deletion, even as small as a single space, will trigger the asterisk. Final Draft doesn't use strikeout mode to indicate deletions as some word processors do. As you know, show business likes stars. If for some reason the color of your revised text doesn't change, go to the Production menu and select Revisions. Down here you'll find a color picker for revised text. Click on it and choose the color you want your revised text to be. Don't worry about the rest of the settings. I'm going to assume you're not creating a production draft, so at some point you'll want to integrate your preferred changes into your script, clean it up. Select the revision, then under the Production menu, select Clear Revised. The text will go black, and the margin star will disappear. This method is fine for smaller changes here and there or marking something revised after you've written it. But for a serious rewrite session, you'll want revision mode. Just choose the mode from the Production menu. Or, if you've been clever enough to add the revision button to your toolbar, click it. Every change you make will now automatically be registered as a revision. To turn off revision mode, click the button again or deselect it from the menu. It's great to know what you've changed, but what if you want to go back to what you wrote before the change? That's where auto-backup comes in. While you're writing, the program automatically makes a copy of your entire file each time you save. Take a look. In Preferences, under the Final Draft menu, click on the Auto-Save/Backup tab. You can see that a copy will be made to this folder, and a maximum of these many versions will be kept before Final Draft starts overwriting the oldest copy. To change the backup folder, click here and choose the folder you prefer. No matter where you put your backup folder, here's a tip. Create an alias or shortcut to that folder and put it somewhere convenient: Your Finder sidebar, the desktop, wherever. That way, if you do want to go back to a previous version, you won't have to drill three or four folders down to find your backups. And don't forget, just because Final Draft makes automatic backups for you doesn't mean you can forget about making your own backups of all your important data. To learn more about this, try the course macOS Sierra Essential Training. Or you can try Windows 10 Essential Training. The star method of revision marking has been around since scripts were written on typewriters by people who were also called typewriters. It's just as critical to the writing process today. Thank goodness Final Draft has made the process auto-magical.
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Course Contents
Fade In Professional Screenwriting Software is the most advanced software used by professionals writing for motion pictures, television, video games, the stage, radio, and more.
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Final Draft 10
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