Fade In also has helpful features like The Dialogue Tuner, which allows you to see everything a single character says in one window to make sure that their dialogue is consistent across your screenplay. A major feature of that style are tabs that allow you to have lists of characters and locations in addition to enabling you to see your scenes listed chronologically with information about their location and length (both in terms of page numbers and running time). Created by screenwriter Kent Tessman, Fade In has its own formatting style, which some screenwriters find advantageous. His desire to have a specific format for movie musical lyrics led him and his team to create a simple feature in Highland to format lyrics in screenplays-which involves putting a tilde before the lyric-that came in handy when he was writing Frankenweenie (2012).Īnother well-known alternative to Final Draft is Fade In. August has also used Highland to improve his own experiences of writing screenplays. After working with editors who used non-linear systems such as Final Cut Pro and Avid, which enable them to store important material that they might not need at the moment, he developed a series of features for Highland called The Bin and The Scratch Pad that allow screenwriters to save blocks of text next to their document. Earlier in his career, he would have a separate file that contained all the material he wouldn’t currently need for a screenplay but didn’t want to lose. “Your application should be smart enough to recognize what it is actually doing,” August says.Īugust’s experiences as a screenwriter have informed how he shaped Highland. Another example is how, in Highland, you can write a transition by putting a greater than symbol in front of the words “cut to” and having it format immediately into a transition on the far-right side of the page. While the tab feature and autofill “smart type” function in Final Draft is effective, there is something comforting about Highland’s ability to take simple commands and translate them into screenplay format.

That will automatically center the dialogue.

But in Highland, all you need to do to format dialogue is type a character’s name in all capitalized letters and write dialogue underneath it. For example, if you wanted to write a character’s name in Final Draft so you can write dialogue underneath it, you’d have to hit the tab key. That means it allows you to start typing and formats the text as you write. Highland is distinguished by its plain text philosophy.

Currently known as Highland 2 (though August refers to it as Highland and notes that is what future versions of it will be called), this software originally began as a tool that August had asked software engineer Nima Yousefi to create that would be “a digital hammer that could smash open PDF and take the text out of it.” August then wondered what would happen if he could take the text and turn it back into a PDF, which led him and his employees at Quote-Unquote Apps to develop Highland as screenwriting software. In addition to writing films such as Big Fish (2003) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), August is the creator of Highland, a prominent Final Draft alternative. Everyone’s used to it, and they’ve gotten up to speed with it, so it feels weird just to try to change,” says screenwriter John August. “I think there’s a sort of Stockholm syndrome that’s kicked in with Final Draft. And some contend that Final Draft’s great popularity is not because of its prowess as screenwriting software, but more because of a kind of complacency, an acceptance of Final Draft’s limitations without actively seeking for, or creating, alternatives. Some screenwriters have complained about its high price, glitches, and the specifics of its feature set, saying the program doesn’t support their creative process enough and doesn’t have features they need. Final Draft’s great success-complete with a Primetime Emmy Engineering Award it received in 2013- has led it to become known as the “industry standard” for screenwriting.īut at the same time, Final Draft has attracted a fair amount of criticism. Co-founded in 1990 and now in its 12th version, the Final Draft screenwriting software boasts both a user-friendly interface and features related to both outlining and production.

If you’re a screenwriter or want to be a screenwriter, then at some point you will have used Final Draft. Arc Studio, Celtx, Craig Mazin, Fade In, Final Draft, Highland, Highland 2, john august, Kelly Marcel, Michael Sarnoski, WriterDuet

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