![]() Once the labour-intensive work of creating categorised lists is done, those lists are exported to a budgeting and scheduling program. This is the nitty-gritty stuff of making a film out of a screenplay by way of transforming certain words into filmic "reality": for example, the word "chair" into a real chair. Another category is "Costume", yet another is "Cast Member". For example, a producer may go through a screenplay and tag items that can be categorised as "Props", thus listing items that are needed for a scene and how much of the budget is required to purchase them. "Tags" is normally used by producers to make lists of things for costing and scheduling. ![]() IS FINAL DRAFT'S TAGS USEFUL FOR WRITERS? (modified) I'm new to WriterSolo and that may very well be a factor in my not being as "flowy" in it - which is why it's important for you to judge for yourselves. WriterSolo is free and Final Draft has a 30-day free trial. My advice - if asked for - is to suggest try both. When I type in Final Draft it feels ever-so slightly less stilted - if that's the right word - than when I've typing in WriterSolo. That hard-to-describe thing that you feel more than know. As it stands, WriterSolo's alternate dialogue is a worthy attempt but is not quite there with Final Draft's. So too should WriterSolo copy Final Draft's Alternate Dialogue implementation. So, why not implement in similar fashion a marker in the margin for ScriptNotes? Click it and the ScriptNotes dialog pops up and if content is placed in it, the marker then becomes a "permanent" fixture in the margin to indicate there's a note. The irony is that, like WriterSolo's Comment marker, Final Draft's Alternate Dialogue marker too appears next to an element when the cursor is placed in that element. Final Draft's execution of Alternate Dialogue is better than WriterSolo's. I've suggested to the Final-Draft people to expand the mechanism it uses for Alternate Dialogue. WriterSolo's implementation of this feature makes flow happen: there's the marker next to your writing for quick access. Yes, Final Draft's excellent ScriptNotes could be made simpler and more efficient by learning from WriterSolo. Again, it lends to the overall feel of flow. Now, I'm getting into the habit of using Bookmarks for all my writing. I needed placeholders to do this efficiently - enter Bookmarks. Foolishly, I didn't appreciate this feature in Final Draft until I began to attempt to write 12 episodes in the one file and had to move back and forth among the episodes - the few I did start on - to check consistency. But instead of pausing to correct it, a macro does it for me, perhaps gaining half-a-second each time.Īnother thing. About half-a-dozen times in the first few pages I lapsed into spelling it "Bently". One of the main characters in "Kuga's Way (pilot)" is "Bentley". Sure, I'm talking about gaining merely fractions of a second. I don't have to press the shift key when typing the first letter. As I type a character name in action paragraphs, automatically the first letter is capitalised. I have "programmed" macros that make it so. ![]() Whatever features screenwriting software have, ultimately it's in the flow. For the few hours I've been writing episode one of the Six Sixers, titled "Day of the Triffids" in WriterSolo's superb environment, and, in the process, still learning the ins and outs of its user-interface, I realised why Final Draft means so much to me.
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