Mike Jones Digital Basin
screen media rinse cycle

New Celtx - New Goodness

It seems like only yesterday I was kicking around a fledgling and ambitious software tool. Back then CELTX was a baby-faced kid with a lot of promise and a host of good ideas rattling around. Today CELTX seems a teenager that grew up into a brash young adult possessing a refreshing blend of enthusiasm and escalating maturity.

Version 2.5 of CELTX was recently slipped into the wild and does its level best to up the ante another notch. Certainly there are a string of features that will make existing users very happy with new options that have been at the top of the request list. Screenplay text can now be "locked" to prevent edits and alterations. This is perfect for allowing the production team to access the CELTX project file, perform mark-up and add notes and annotations but leave the script itself in tact and locked-off.

In a similar vein of facilitating project sharing and collaboration (which is truly the beating throbbing heart of CELTX) 2.5 also adds a a new ?Revision? mode which allows for different department heads and collaborators to revise the script with their own uniquely coloured amendments. These amendments can then be viewed like filters - turned off and on at will - and allow a highly effective and very visual method of tracking changes and viewing suggestions and alterations.  Changes and additions are highlighted directly on the script and in the particular assigned colour. Its simple, effective and really bloody useful.

Add to this an integrated Chat system right inside CELTX for live collaboration and integrates with your Celtx Studio account and you have something really very special.

But the bit of Newness that has me most excited is SKETCH. In typical broad-thinking Celtx fashion SKETCH is not one tool to do one thing but a little eco-system that can serve a number of uses depending on your needs.

Ostensibly Sketch is a rudimentary drawing tool based on a kind of clip-art and basic geometric shapes. But once you start to doodle a bit with its incredible practical usefulness becomes glaringly apparent. For some, Sketch is a very fast and efficient means to produce storyboard cells and framing ideas for shots. But through its integration with the existing Storyboard function of Celtx, Sketch is enabled to take on a more directly technical and logistical function as a top-down, mud-map, tool for producing camera and staging plans. Sitting side by side with the Storyboard cell, Sketch in this way becomes a Cinematographers best friend, allowing them to pre-plan the position of lights, props, and movements long before they walk onto set. The first thing some of my cinematographer students did when I showed them was populate the storyboard cells with their reccy photos of locations and have them as a visual reference for their camera plans. Print the whole thing off and take onto set - or if you're really a digital-native, print to PDF and throw it on your phone/PDA and carry it right onto set with you.

Packs of the vector-based clip-art icons and diagrams (known as Art Packs) can be purchased from the Celtx website for next to nothing - currently their are 3 art-packs with scores of images for just $6!.

Sketch is just the beginning, it's fairly simple at the moment but with Celtx's completely user-focused development style, they will listen rather than dictate what their users want. With the feedback that comes in on how users want and plan to use Sketch we?ll certainly see Sketch grow into one very effective pre-production tool.

So there really is No excuse now. If you arent using Celtx, youre outa ya mind!
www.celtx.com

Posted at 12:00AM Nov 30, 2009 by Mike Jones in general  |  Comments[3]