We've all watched a disappointing movie and said, "I could write it better than that." Perhaps you can! The trick is, getting your great idea into a professional format acceptable to producers, agents, managers—those gatekeepers of Hollywood, Bollywood, Euro studio, indie, and elsewhere. It doesn't matter how good your script might be if it doesn't look right. Yes, they are that particular. They won't read it.
The answer (and it's an easy one) to writing screenplays in the rigid format required is software. The two big name "professional" scriptwriting programs—Final Draft and Movie Magic—each retail for over $200. What if you could get software that not only lets you turn out scripts just as professional as the big money programs but does a lot more? What if you get it for free? Well, Celtx (pronounced kel-tiks) costs nothing but a few seconds of downloading time.
Is that worth a shot or what?
Of course, you like that whole concept of a no-cost solution or we wouldn't be here this book. Sell one screenplay and the cost of this book will be a pretty good investment. The purpose of these pages is to gift you with the knowledge and skills to use Celtx to its full advantage.
In this chapter, we shall:
- Discuss system requirements needed to run Celtx
- Find Celtx's home on the web
- Check out the languages available
- Decide on and download our new software for our specific operating system
- Install Celtx on our computer(s)
- Test our installation to make sure that it works and check out some of the neat and useful features
- Summarize what we've learned and find out some other sources for additional information
By the end of this chapter, we will have a fully running version of Celtx, ready for action, and we'll know which option to use depending on what we want to accomplish. This is all easy and fun. So hold on to your keyboard, because here we go!
First, we need a computer.
Okay, yeah, but Celtx fits a much wider range of computers than most software; certainly more than the big commercial packages that only work on PC or Mac. Unless you're still running an Apple II from 1980, chances are Celtx has you covered.
The very best thing about Celtx is that it's free! There are two definitions of free that people throw around—free beer and free speech. Celtx is free in both ways. There's no cost for Celtx, like free beer, and you can do whatever you want with it, within certain limits, like free speech. Later, we'll talk about other additional services and products that are almost free, but for now, Celtx is free.
By the way, Celtx requires 75 MB of free hard disk space for installation. In these days of multi-hundred-gigabyte disks, this is a very light footprint indeed.
Any relatively recent PC from the last ten years or so handles Celtx with no problem. Celtx runs on XP, NT, 2000, Vista, and the latest, Windows 7.
Just about any Apple Mac OS X (also know as Tiger) machine since 2002, runs Celtx. Celtx is a universal binary, meaning it works equally well on X86 (Intel based) or Power PC Macs.
Hundreds of Linux distributions or distros (versions of Linux from different groups or companies) exist. Celtx works fine on pretty much all of them (at least all the X6 or Intel processor machines) so long as certain supporting library packages (collections of common routines programs needed to operate) are installed. Don't worry, this takes about ten seconds, and we'll check and do this, if needed, in this chapter concerning installation of Celtx on Linux.
Since 2008, Netbooks (subcompact notebook computers) have been available. Many of the earlier ones run Windows XP, although more recent offerings provide Vista or even Windows 7. Netbooks also might have various "lite" versions of Linux. Celtx loves them all, and we'll sort this out in the eeePC installation section forthcoming in this very chapter.
So, let's download Celtx and install it.