Celtx: Open Source Screenwriting Beginner's Guide: Celtx won't write your script for you, but it will ensure it has the format and features demanded by the film industry. Learn to use Celtx along with insider secrets of screenwriting and script-marketing into the bargain.

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.

Using software is much more pleasant if the instructions on the screen and the menu choices make sense. Celtx currently offers 33 choices of language (see the first column on the Download page) in every operating system version except for eeePC (which is only available in English).

These language selections, of course, only affect the on-screen instructions and menu selections, not whatever language you write. For example, let's say you are Dutch (I am always awed by how well so many Dutch folk speak English) and you write scripts for Hollywood in English but prefer to have Celtx's choices in your native language just to speed things up. No problem; choose Nederlands off the download matrix and Downloaden in the right operating system column for your computer.

Write in Hindi for Bollywood? Well, you still can, but there is no Hindi version yet, so, for now, the instructions will be in English or whatever other available language you might be more comfortable in. One caveat to this—the software may have been translated into these languages, but not all of them are supported by Celtx's online PDF generation. (Typeset does not support non-Latin characters at the moment. So, although the program may be in Hindi, it isn't possible to use the Typeset feature as of yet. Cyrillic and Phonym languages such as Russian, Chinese, and Japanese are also affected.)

In the first column of the Download page, again, is our choice of language. The remaining four columns—Windows, OS X (for Mac), Linux (see the little Linux mascot penguin?), and eeePC—are where you choose the right version for your computer.

We are now ready to use Celtx on our Windows computer.

We are now ready to use Celtx on our Mac computer.

That completes the installation of Celtx on Linux for a single user.

Celtx is now installed on a Netbook.

As this book goes to press, Celtx has just released a new app (application) for the Apple iPad tablet computer and also an app for the popular iPhone Smartphone (the latter is free). The first may be purchased through the The App Store, visit http://celtx.com/mobile.html for details on both purchase and how to use these add-ons.

This allows us to work on Celtx scripts on the iPad or iPhone and sync them with Celtx on our home computers or laptop.

Okay, we've double-clicked on the movie clapper and next we see a splash screen. it's the same on all systems and looks similar to the following screenshot:

On the left, we have the major types of projects Celtx excels at, which are as follows:

On the right are your current projects. In this case, Portals is one of my scripts in progress, which we'll be using as an example. There are two copies of it because it's on two machines as a backup.

The remainder of material at the bottom of the splash page consists of links to the Celtx Studio service and the other things they sell to support Celtx, all optional. This latter information is loaded from the Internet. If it's not visible, you'll need to activate your Internet connection. To get the full power of Celtx, it must have Internet access.

Let's do just a little more installation work before we go wild and have some fun exploring Celtx. Here's why.

The full power of Celtx is available through your Internet connection.

Additional dictionaries are available for the spellchecker. These are needed if you want to, for example, write in more than one language and proof them all. For the basic American English installation, the right dictionary is already in place.

Here's how to add dictionaries, so we can do that all-important spellchecking.

Spell checking is now available in the languages for which we downloaded dictionaries. They're free, so add as many languages as you write in.

Film projects are screenplays for movies and television shows. Screenplays have very rigid format requirements. The names of characters must start a certain number of spaces from the left margin. Dialog has its own starting point. Top, bottom, left, and right margins all must be exact. The typeface must absolutely, positively, definitely be Courier 12 point.

For reasons—both traditional and practical, Hollywood producers, agents, and managers have zero tolerance policies on any variance from accepted script standards.

Now you could calculate all these things manually. As a matter of fact, back in the mid 80's when I made my few sales to movie producers, I used a primitive word processing program and did that formatting manually. It was a major pain.

Celtx gives you all you need to write professional level screenplays from Day One.

Here's the short course as an intro. Open a Film project (again, on the splash page, click on Film). Look at the little window just to the right of Project Library, the one with the word Scene Heading in it. Click on the down arrow to the right of Action. We have eight choices. For now, we will ignore Transition and Shot, as those are not used in spec screenplays (spec screenplays being scripts written on "speculation" as opposed to being assigned). The other six give you everything needed to write a screenplay that could sell to a major motion picture director.

As mentioned, we'll be using my script "Portals" as an example. This is what the script is about (a one sentence summary called a logline (more about those in Chapter 7) is used to interest agents and producers in reading your script).

Logline: An engineer's invention instantly teleports people thousands of miles but he must battle to save himself and his friends from greedy corporations and panicked governments determined not to become obsolete.

The following screenshot shows how the script looks as it is being written in Celtx's Film project:

This is easy to accomplish by selecting Action from the drop-down. Similarly, you can select Character and put in the speaker's name, or select Dialog and type what they say. However, the real magic comes when we hit the Typeset/PDF button at the bottom of the screen and get a PDF file ready for saving and printing, or just e-mailing (the more normal thing these days) to an agent or producer, and which looks similar to the following screenshot (remember, we got to have an Internet connection for this to work):

Of course, if we are writing this script for an independent producer or ourselves to produce, we can add scene numbers, transitions, types of shots, and a lot of other stuff forbidden in spec scripts. We discuss more about all this and show you how it works with some good tips as we move on through this book.

Okay, let's close the Film project and restart Celtx to get the splash screen (although you can have several projects open at once, if you like). Click on Audio-Visual.

What? It doesn't look very different from the Film project we just opened, does it?

Well, the big difference is in that little magic box just to the right of Project Library again. Click on the down arrow. Now we find only five choices: Scene Heading, Shot, Character, Dialog, and Parenthetical. This is because audio-visual presentations are different from the storytelling of a movie. Audio-visual could be anything from a script for a slide show, to a documentary video, to a commercial for TV. The printed format is different as well, as we can see in the following screenshot:

Now, let's open a Theatre project. (Yep, Celtx uses the British or, in this case, Canadian spelling, eh?) Go to our magic box. The big difference is Stage Direction. Also, the output format for a standard stage play differs from that of a film or audio-visual production.

Celtx conforms to the two most accepted play formats—American format and "Classic" or European format. When the play is written, the screen looks like a screenplay, but when it's typeset, the format is changed to whichever option we choose.

An Audio Play project could be a radio play, a podcast, a speech, or any other production consisting solely of sound. Open up a new Audio Play project and check out the selections in that box. Headings such as Sound, Voice, and Music give us clues as to what type of script we will be writing in this type of project.

This format conforms to BBC Radio Drama guidelines in its formatting and is pretty much the only standard which has been clearly defined in the audio world.

Open a Comic Book project. Check the magic box. We find selections such as Page, Panel, Caption, and Balloon Type. The things we need to do are write and format a standard comic book script.

Finally, in our tour of the six types of major projects Celtx handles, we come to the Storyboard. Let's open a Storyboard project.

Whoa! Look at the following screenshot; there's something that looks different:

The Storyboard project is a powerful and extensive method of visually planning complete productions. For example, if you're producing an independent film, you can plan every single shot in it.

Okay, we've now had a brief introduction to the six major types of Celtx projects and will be moving on to greater detail in the following chapters.