Screenwriting

Software

Formatting is not the hard part, and you should not pay much for it. Start free.

MOFA's own

MOFA Screenwriter — a Fountain editor we run ourselves. Source on the left, the formatted page on the right, and a page count measured the way a production office measures it: 12pt Courier, standard margins, 55 lines a page, with (MORE) and (CONT'D) when a speech crosses a page break. It exports Fountain, Final Draft .fdx, plain text, and PDF, and it imports .fdx if you are coming off Final Draft. No account, and the file is yours — it is a plain .fountain on disk.

Free

Tool Notes Link
Fountain A plain-text markup for screenplays. Your script is a .txt file that any editor opens, that diffs in git, and that will still open in forty years. Exports to PDF and imports into every major app. fountain.io
WriterDuet Free tier with a script limit; real-time collaboration is its strength — genuinely useful for a co-written contest entry. writerduet.com
Celtx Free tier covering scriptwriting, with paid tiers adding breakdown and scheduling. celtx.com

If you write in Fountain, you can draft on a phone in any notes app and it stays correctly formatted. For a filmmaker who writes in gaps between other work, that matters more than any feature list.

Paid

Tool Notes Link
Fade In One-time purchase, imports and exports every common format, very close to industry standard. The usual recommendation for someone who wants to buy once. fadeinpro.com
Final Draft The industry default. Buy it when a job requires it, not before. finaldraft.com

Pricing changes; check the vendor pages rather than trusting a figure quoted elsewhere.

Protecting the script

Two separate things, and people confuse them:

  • Copyright registration with the U.S. Copyright Office is the one with legal teeth. Registration before infringement — or within three months of publication — is what makes statutory damages and attorney's fees available. Register at copyright.gov/registration.
  • WGA registration at wga.org creates a dated record of the draft. Useful for authorship disputes and available to non-members. It is not a substitute for copyright registration.

Do the copyright registration. It is inexpensive and it is the one that matters in court. See Business, Legal & Insurance.

Writing for what you can actually shoot

Most Central Ohio scripts fail in production for reasons the writer could have fixed on the page.

  • Count your locations before your pages. Every company move costs hours. Three locations is a manageable weekend; eight is not.
  • Write the weather you can get. "Exterior, snow" written in July is a scene you will cut.
  • Every named character is a casting problem, a release form, and a call time. Combine them.
  • Children, animals, water, fire, cars in motion, and crowds each multiply your day. Any one of them is a choice; three is a different budget.
  • Write to your best actor's strengths once cast. A rewrite after casting is not a compromise, it is the point.
  • Read it aloud with other people in the room. Every clunky line surfaces in the first ten minutes.
  • If a scene exists to convey information, cut it and find a way to show the information inside a scene that already exists.

Getting feedback

  • MOFA meetings are a table read waiting to happen. See Community & Networking.
  • Columbus has a large stage-acting community that will read for the experience — a two-hour read with real actors is worth more than ten rounds of written notes.
  • Screenplay competitions offer coverage, with wide variation in quality. See Contests & Competitions.
  • Academic programmes at OSU and CCAD run workshops and public readings.

Related

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