Celtx pre-production software is one of the most exciting filmmaking products to come along in a long time. I highly recommend it for any machinima maker’s toolkit. It’s free, under constant development / improvement, and is very well supported by its community. And officially, it is pronounced either “kel-tix” or “cel-tex”, either one will do.

Celtx can help you write and organize scripts, adhering to the formatting standards of professional scriptwriting, which can be annotated with all manner of notes, pictures, and multimedia files. It helps if you’ve got some familiarity with those standards, but even if you don’t this tool can actually teach you some of the conventions just by using it. (Click here for one take on the Standard Script Format)

Unlike I’d originally thought, Celtx is not a storyboarding tool per se, though a storyboard component is said to be among the future features which will be added. Actually, in its current form, it’s important to note that Celtx is NOT designed to help you PLAN your script… there are no outlining tools yet; it’s designed to help you WRITE your script. (If you’re interested in a storyboarding tool, you might take a look at Storyboard Tools.)

Celtx has customizable HTML templates for character and scene descriptions. The reason templates of this kind can be helpful when writing / planning is they ask questions that sometimes we forget to think about until much later. Celtx’s default templates encourage you to think about character traits and backgrounds, and for scenes they encourage you to think about the purpose of the scene and how it affects those characters, as well as other minutae like what time of day it is or what the set should look like. With a little coding skill, these templates can be fully customized to suit your needs.

As the script develops, you also have the ability to “tag” words or sentences, adding layers of “supertext” if you will. By tagging props, characters, sound effects, etc., you enable Celtx to automatically generate reports (per scene) which summarize the needed “assets” for each scene. This is a very nice way to efficiently communicate these things to your set designer, sound designer, or whomever, without them having to mine this information out of the script themselves.

Where Celtx really shines is in the collaboration features. Users can upload scripts to a Public area (viewable by all), to a Private area (viewable only by their own account), or a Shared area (viewable by the creator and whomever he/she chooses). Other users who have been given access can download the script, add notes / revisions, and upload it again. There is currently no support for versioning, which is sorely lacking; I’ve read that they are trying to figure out how to add that in the future. But if nothing else, the ability to share your script - with all the “meta” that goes with it like pictures, music, “tagged” items, etc. - is a huge convenience for a team.

The program is not without its faults. It is, after all, still at a version number below 1.0. One really whopping bug to take great caution about is: when you delete a project, Celtx deletes the ENTIRE FOLDER where the project is stored. This isn’t a big deal… unless you accept the default storage location Celtx offers you, which is your MY DOCUMENTS folder in Windows. That’s right… if you delete the project stored there, it deletes the entire folder. Bad news. (Read more here)

Another issue worth mentioning is Celtx’s refusal to save properly to any mapped network drive; you MUST use a local drive. Be aware of this before you start writing your masterpiece. (Read more here)

Even with the bugs here and there, Celtx is a delightful program to use, and will only continue to improve over time. It is a useful tool for scripting in any medium, be it film, animation, theatre… heck, I’ve even started using it to chart out shows for “the overcast” because it’s just so easy to stay organized using it rather than drafting in OpenOffice or something.

Give Celtx a try if it sounds interesting to you. You’ll be glad you did. It’s a strong product, and from what I can tell, its best is yet to come.