In-depth review of Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000 (ScriptThing) script formatting software.

Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000 is produced by ScriptPerfection Enterprises and used to be called ScriptThing. Recently ScriptPerfection have entered into a partnership with Screenplay Systems, and the software has been renamed. Technical support is now provided by Screenplay Systems.

Screenwriter arrives on a CD, and installation is straightforward. PC and Mac versions are included on the same CD, but you get a different manual. (I’ve reviewed version 4.5 for Windows here.) The software is copy protected and you are limited to three concurrent installations. This should be sufficient for most users — but if your system crashes with Screenwriter installed, you’ve lost one of your three lives.

The installation screen allows you to put the software in any directory you choose — but the copy protection won’t let you move Screenwriter to a different directory later. You have to uninstall it first, then re-install it to the new directory.

When you first run Screenwriter, a configuration wizard guides you through setting a large number of preferences. This has a personality which is either friendly or irritating, depending on your point of view, but it greatly simplifies the initial process of configuring the software. (If you choose to cancel the wizard at this point, you can run it later from the menu bar, or change the configuration settings directly, also from the menu bar.)

A refreshing attitude is that upgrades are currently available free of charge to registered users of the previous version of Screenwriter, from the Screenplay Systems web site.

When you open Screenwriter, an illustrated splash box displays for a couple of seconds, and then you’re in.

The basic display is configurable, so if you like a nice empty page with nothing but your script and a simple menu bar at the top, you can have that. Most users will probably want to add trimmings like a tool bar at the top, a scroller to the right and a status bar at the bottom — which still leaves most of the screen for your script.

An optional ruler measures the page width in inches — which makes sense because scripts are usually printed in standard Courier, with ten characters to the inch — and it shows the current paragraph margins.

The tool bar can be configured to show the buttons you find most useful. You can also configure whether Screenwriter opens to a new file, a file-open box, or restores everything as it was when you were last working.

The usual document display is in Courier New, black on white — so it looks almost the same as printed output. But you can change the display to taste, so you can have a different typeface and colour, on a different colour background, and it will still print in Courier, black on white. (So if you used to enjoy writing in WordPerfect for DOS, with its simple blue screen, you can get much the same environment with Screenwriter.) The only problem I found with this was an off-putting screen flicker when scrolling upwards with a dark background.

Both the editing text and the tool buttons can be enlarged to make them more readable.

You can start typing straight away. The script paragraph styles available to you are:

You have to stick with these as you can’t add more — but some of them get renamed if, for example, you change to Novel format.

The layout of each paragraph style is configurable in the usual ways — margins, line spacing, capitalisation, etc. — and the appearance on the screen is a pretty good match for the final printed appearance as long as you use Courier for both.

The standard formats are: Screenplay, Filmed Sitcom, Taped Sitcom, Television, Stage Play, Radio Play, Novel and Multimedia. Additional formats are also included for a few US television series such as Buffy, Baywatch and Caroline in the City. You can also create and save your own custom formats.

A useful feature for writers who use the script format commonly used in Britain for stage and radio is that the Radio Play template positions Dialogue alongside the Character Name, as in:
JACK: I'm surprised to see you.

Screenwriter makes the usual assumptions about things like Dialogue following a Character Name, and hitting Tab to change Action to a Character Name, and Dialogue to a Parenthetical. In a Character Name, an opening parenthesis generates a pop-up selection of extensions such as O.S. and V.O.; whereas an opening parenthesis typed in Dialogue will create a new Parenthetical paragraph.

Screenwriter recognises certain key words as shortcuts. If you type newscene or newact at the start of a paragraph, Screenwriter automatically inserts a new scene or act number and then starts a Scene Header. Likewise it can recognise prologue, teaser and cold opening as key words and respond appropriately.

Any two-word paragraph ending with TO: is converted to a Transition, and the next paragraph is assumed to be a Scene Heading. Screenwriter also automates Scene Headings by assuming that any paragraph beginning with int. or ext. is a Scene Heading. It adds a scene number, starts capitalising, and pops up a list of all the scene locations you’ve already used. You can either scroll and select one of these or create a new one; and then Screenwriter pops up a selection of times-of-day, such as Day, Night, Morning, Continuous, which you can simply scroll and select.

Similarly, as soon as you type a letter in Character Name, a pop-up box offers you all the characters you’ve created so far which start with the letters you’ve typed. And the same pop-up can be called to insert a name anywhere in dialogue or action. (It also pops up unexpectedly if you hit Enter too many times when selecting a character name.) A small irritation with Character Name is that, once you’ve selected from the pop-up list, Screenwriter puts you straight into the following dialogue — so you then have to backspace in order to insert a voice-over tag. This is a real nuisance when writing a phone conversation, when one character is constantly speaking as voice-over. It would be nice if users could optionally configure Screenwriter to assume that, after a character has spoken in voice-over or off-screen, their next speech in a scene will also be voice-over or off-screen, and the extension is added automatically.

A nice feature is that you can optionally set Screenwriter to capitalise the first word of a sentence and pronoun ‘I’ (even in contractions like ‘I’ll’ and ‘I’m’), and ensure single- or double-spacing between sentences. This means you can type away without thinking about nuts and bolts. However Screenwriter doesn’t auto-capitalise characters names when used in action or dialogue, which is a drag on the creative flow.

An unexpected annoyance is that Screenwriter inserts a trailing space while you’re typing any paragraph. It tidies this up as soon as you start a new paragraph, but it looks odd and sometimes causes a problem: if you move the cursor and then return to your paragraph, you may end up with an irritating single space where you don’t want it.

Screenwriter has a good Help, with lots of explanations and screen shots, and also a detailed manual (although some of the fonts and layout are rather cluttered in the old ScriptThing manual I use). If these don’t answer your question, then Screenwriter can log onto the online Technical Support at the Screenplay Systems web site, which has tutorials, FAQs and an email query service.

Even though certain editing commands — such as entering a Tab — are shortcuts for script formatting effects, many conventional word processor effects can still be obtained. You can break up a long speech with a new paragraph or a new line, and there’s a ‘normal word processor’ mode where entering a Tab will create a tab-like effect by inserting 5 spaces. (The mnemonics for these effects aren’t very memorable, but they can also be found in menu options.)

There are also some handy shortcuts for Continental characters — using a dead key to insert an acute accent over whatever vowel is typed next, and other dead-key combinations to insert grave accents, circumflexes, cedillas, umlauts and tildes. Alternatively Screenwriter’s menu can call up the Windows Character Map to insert any character you can find.

Hard and soft hyphens, spaces and returns are also available — so you can ensure ‘Mr Pennington’ doesn’t get split by an end-of-line.

Screenwriter can handle two-column layout — for example when two characters speak simultaneously. This could also be used for documentary scripts, where visuals and commentary need to be aligned side-by-side.

Search and Replace work pretty much as you would expect, and there’s a slightly modified version of Replace to use if you want to change a character’s name.

A Go-To feature allows you to skip to the next page, scene or act, or the next speech by a specified character, the next marginal note, or a bookmark. (You can insert up to 15 bookmarks.)

You can add words to the spell-check dictionary, and additional dictionaries are available in British-English, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish. A format checker can scan your script and correct errors such as blank lines or two consecutive speeches by the same character (where an intervening action has been deleted). You can also scan for words in a configurable list of homonyms — such as ‘their’ and ‘there’.

Screenwriter has a built-in thesaurus, and also supports WordWeb, an excellent dictionary/thesaurus available as freeware for Windows.

You can set top and bottom page margins, and also a binding margin — all in inches. The page format is taken automatically from your default printer, so if you’ve changed that to A4, Screenwriter should format your script to A4. This format can be overridden, but you’ll have to do that every time you run Screenwriter — it doesn’t remember changed page format.

The entire script can be printed, or just specific pages or scenes. You can also print out a character list, a shot list, a scene heading list, a list of locations, a production breakdown, all the script notes, or all the asterisked pages.

Scripts can be sent to fax software instead of the printer, and can also be output in an Adobe PDF file for display and printing on a machine which doesn’t have Screenwriter installed.

You can configure Screenwriter to display and print scripts in different fonts. This is handy if, for example, your printer’s built-in version of Courier is better than the TrueType or PostScript version available on your screen. You can also configure Screenwriter to darken each character by double-printing it slightly, to make the normal Courier New a bit heavier — although in my experience this effect isn’t entirely perfect.

Scripts can be ‘cheated’ to make them seem shorter or longer than they really are, by adjusting the inter-line spacing before printing.

For security, you can add a configurable watermark to each page, and also print out a signature page.

A small standalone program called PrintThing is supplied with Screenwriter. This allows you to view and print Screenwriter scripts on other PCs without installing the whole Screenwriter program. (I’m not sure whether there's a Mac version of this.) The manual doesn’t say whether you're allowed to give copies of PrintThing to colleagues so they can print out emailed copies of your scripts.

The User Lists are configurable, so you can edit the Time-of-Day list (Day, Night, etc.), the Extensions (O.S., V.O., etc.), the Scene Header list (Int., Ext., etc.) and numerous other lists.

Screenwriter automatically creates lists of Character Names and Scene Locations as you write.

A wide range of Screenwriter’s default settings are configurable — so you can customise

• some of the assumptions Screenwriter makes about what paragraph style to use,
• spell checking, and other checking for errors (such as capital letters at the start of sentences, and double-spacing between sentences),
• how to treat revised pages,
• keyboard hotkeys (for example, whether to use Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V for Cut and Paste),
• colours and appearance

as well as many other settings.

Files are saved in a proprietary compressed format, with the option to save in plain ASCII, WordPerfect 5.1 or 6, RTF, Scriptware, MS Word 2.0, Final Draft RTF, Final Draft Converter, and HTML. Screenwriter can import files in ASCII, RTF, WordPerfect, MS Word, Scriptware, Movie Master, WordStar and Dramatica Exchange. I didn’t test all the formats, so I’m assuming they work accurately. In the case of imports, ‘can’ is actually more like ‘attempts to’. My experience of importing scripts from ASCII and WordPerfect is that Screenwriter is about 95 per cent successful at applying the correct paragraph styles, and manual correction is needed. And a small glitch with saving to HTML format was that, although the file saved in the correct format, Screenwriter insisted in adding .rtf to the file name, however much I tried to force it to add .html.

Screenwriter makes timed backup at user-specified intervals, and when you close a script it asks if you would also like to make a backup copy on floppy disk (as a safeguard against a disaster with your PC). You can specify the default directory for saving and opening scripts, and also a directory for saving timed backups.

You can edit the header for each page, so it contains just the page number or more information such as date and scene number. The cover page can be edited in a special module, which allows you to use place any text anywhere on the page using any font. These cover pages can be saved, so they can be re-used and amended for other scripts.

The script can be displayed in the form of index cards for each scene. This gives you a better overview of sequences, and allows you easily to drag-and-drop a scene to a different place in the script. These can also be printed to actual index cards.

The index cards are the only form of rudimentary outlining tool in Screenwriter.

Any character’s dialogue can be highlighted so it’s easy to see.

One of the paragraph styles allows you to add ‘marginal notes’ in your script. These appear in the script in a coloured frame, which can be hidden as a small box in the left margin. You can choose whether or not to print the notes.

Screenwriter can automatically mark changes to a script, by adding an asterisk in the margin or by colouring edited text for easy identification.

You can lock a script so that scene and page numbers will remain the same during any subsequent changes. New scenes and pages are suffixed with ‘A’, ‘B’, etc., and deleted scenes and pages are marked as ‘Omitted’. Drafts can be colour-coded (using the standard Hollywood sequence of White, Blue, etc., or a custom sequence), and the colour description can be included in the page header text.

Speeches can be automatically numbered, for animation and radio production — and you can print out an animation recording script, containing the dialogue without any visual descriptions.

You can create a short summary of each scene, to use in breakdowns, and Screenwriter can generate a character list for each scene. Both of these are in the form of marginal notes, so they can be hidden when printing the script.

Words and phrases in the script can be tagged to indicate Wardrobe, Props, Special Effects, Stunts, etc., for listing in production breakdowns. These breakdowns can be printed or exported to Movie Magic Scheduling.

If you’re writing the script for a computer game, Screenwriter has a Multimedia template and can draw a visual graph of the various branching routes through the story. A small standalone program is included which can ‘play’ the script, allowing you to choose between the options. (I haven’t tested these features so I can’t comment on how effective they might be.)

Screenwriter can compare two open scripts, and can analyse a script according to length of speeches, length of action descriptions, and breakdown of each character’s dialogue.

The name tool lists 22,000 male, female and family names.

If you have Microsoft’s Text-to-Speech Engine installed, Screenwriter can read your script back to you. If you don’t have it installed, Screenwriter is supposed to download it from the Internet. However the download failed when I tried it, and I had to email Technical Support for assistance (which arrived speedily, the next day). Once I got it working, I couldn’t see the point of it. It sounds like what it is: synthesised robotic voices without any emotion at all. You really need to hear your script read by humans who can put a little bit of expression into the dialogue.

A communications tool allows you to connect with a writing partner over the Internet and collaborate on a script. (I haven’t tried this, so I can’t comment on how easy or successful it might be.)

If you want to put your script on a web site, Screenwriter simplifies the process. All you do is type in your web site address and password, and Screenwriter converts the script to HTML, logs on, and uploads it — simple. (Note: if you do this, it’s equally easy for anyone to steal or misuse your script!)

Screenwriter also simplifies the process of registering your script with FirstUse.com. (I know very little about FirstUse.com, so I can’t comment on how useful their service may be, or how effective this feature may be.)

In my experience Screenwriter has been pretty stable. Once or twice I’ve known it to throw a Windows error and then crash, and occasionally it has mismanaged the repainting of a pop-up box.

Overall Screenwriter is a superb script writing tool. It’s easy to get the hang of, and once you know the editing shortcuts it makes the job of typing a breeze.

It’s particularly strong at providing quick pop-up screens to simplify scene headers and character names; and it’s highly configurable throughout, from display to printing, so you can adapt it to your own way of working.

The multimedia, animation and production tools are also extensive.

Screenwriter was available direct from ScriptPerfection Enterprises and Screenplay Systems , and also from discount suppliers.

The list price in January 2002 was $270, but the cheapest price I found was $180, excluding tax and delivery.

A demo version was also available for download from the ScriptPerfection and Screenplay Systems web sites.