The Celtx Blog

Seeds 2

If you're sitting on one or more short videos, get ready to dust off the best one.

Seeds 2 -- coming soon.  Subscribe for launch news here.  Previous recipient videos and interviews can be viewed here.

Tribeca Films -- A Bellwether for Crowdfunding?

If it please the prosecution, please permit me to draw your attention to Tribeca Films' recent article on Kickstarter's $100M intake last year.

Of that $100M, almost $32.5M were pledged towards film & video projects.

In 2011, film & video projects were pledged $32,473,790, a larger number than all projects in 2010.  These pledges came from 308,541 backers, for an average pledge of $105.25 per backer.

To put it in ordinary language—over 300,000 people decided that a large number of film/video projects on Kickstarter were worthy enough to  “invest/give” an average of $100.

This makes me happy.  Despite myriad sky-is-falling pronouncements from Hollywood lobbyists entrenched in 20th century business models, these kinds of articles suggest that there's still a hunger for market-driven content.

I don't think I'm alone here, so I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that what there isn't a hunger for is the nth sequel to a bloated and story-less property that I must endure watching in a venue filled with Chatty Cathy types who aren't willing to turn off their cellphones for a couple hours after paying a tickets/snacks/parking/babysitter aggregate that would exceed discount regional airfare.  Call it a hunch.

Besides, you know those DVDs we all snarfed up over the past decade?  Yeah, I wanted to see them in their full glory, so I bought a 42" plasma screen and nice mid-range 5.1 home theatre.

Tribeca's observations on Kickstarter are prescient.  The model is changing.  It's getting pulled by the market.  It's getting push by creators.  It's getting push-back by those unwilling to evolve with the direction the 21st century is pointed.  It's not going to work but sometimes you gotta wonder at whatever masochistic Sisyphean impulse that can command a good lobbyist.

I suspect the safe money is on seeing more successes from the Kickstarters and IndieGogos out there.  Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to silently rooting for Lisanne & Jamie, creators of crowd-funded Indie Game:  The Movie on the eve of their first Sundance!

Success Stories of a Different Hue

It's a droll cliche to observe the 50-year author praised as an "overnight success" when she may have been shelving rejected manuscripts for the preceding 30 years.

One of my personal inspirations is knowing that Ridley Scott who was 41 years-old when he directed Alien in 1979.

But I get a distinctly different buzz when I see kids applying their hand to the craft of storytelling.  It's a back-handed compliment to say, "Good work -- for a kid."  I know I found comments like that insulting when I was a kid, so we here at Chez Celtx are pleased to offer the following:

Check out the trailer for the new short film Monitor by 64-Bit Films.  It's great!  No qualifiers, no caveats.  It is just fantastic.

Check it out.  I'll wait.

[Hold music to the tune of "Tie a Yellow Ribbon"]

And... we're back.  How many shades of awesome is that?  Nothing embodies the "damn the torpedoes | get it done | barbarian at the gates of Rome" mentality more than seeing people outside the system following their bliss without waiting on permission from self-appointed industry gatekeepers.

Following now is a short Q&A from a conversation I had with director Jared Rosenthal.

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Q:    How long did each phase (pre-production, production, post-production) take you?

A:    We first had the idea for Monitor in the late summer of 2009, but we knew we would need more than a full year to pull together everything we needed for the shoot.  We ended up shooting in August of 2011 for six days, so pre-production was the longest stage of the process by far.  We were 14 when we started development on the project, and we were acutely aware of the enormity of the material we were tackling.  We also knew that if we ever wanted to see the project to fruition, we needed all of our bases covered, and we needed a powerful script to draw people in.  We must have done nearly 10 significant re-writes of the script before we finally had something we were comfortable shooting.

 We used Celtx the entire time.  Throughout pre-production we would use the sketch tool to illustrate certain setups and ideas, which we would bounce back and forth with each other and make notes on.  Production lasted six and a half days, plus a pick-ups day and a rehearsal day.  We were really only supposed to shoot for a week, but we got rained out our last day and moved two of the scenes that we needed to shoot to later in the week.

 Post-production started pretty much the minute we began shooting.  We shot the entire film on two
Canon 60Ds, and we would usually have someone off to the side dumping and batching footage once we filled up a card.  The fast turnaround time ended up being something of a life-saver.  We had shot a really critical rain scene involving the main character, Karen (Anne DeAcetis), and a pickup truck.  I batched all the footage onto our little portable hard drive, and as we were in the car driving back home I cut together the footage on my laptop and realized that we were missing some critical shots.  So we were able to catch the mistake incredibly early in the process.  It would have been disastrous if we had waited.  We just sent out the final cut last week, so post took us about four-and-a-half months.

Q:    Did you have financing?  Did you have to call in favours and hope for the best?

A:    We wanted to finance as much of the film as possible by ourselves, but we ended up having to look for donors.  Because we had initially believed we were going to pay out of pocket, we were able to keep the budget extremely low.  During our two years of pre-production, we contacted dozens of film equipment companies to see if we could get gear in return for product reviews.  We were able to assemble quite a big arsenal of equipment that we fully utilized over the course of the shoot, and that was a major help.  One of our biggest challenges was also looking for a police car for one of the final scenes of the film.  We contacted dozens of people from the local law enforcement to no avail, but then it turned out that Anne, our lead, knew one of the officers on the force from high school.  So we were able to call in a massive favor and get a real police car for the shoot.  Ironically, we were able to get help from law enforcement, but we were never able to get permission to shoot at a supermarket.  We had to steal some of those shots.

Q:    What was the hardest part of the process for you?

A:    My first reaction to this question was to talk about how hard it was to get a bunch of professional adult actors (and adult donors) to trust in a bunch of teenagers for a project as big as this was.  But truth be told, everyone was exceptionally trusting and dedicated.  Our actors gave it their all, and we couldn't be more grateful for that.  The most difficult technical challenge (at least for me) was the degree to which we shot out of order.  At 34 minutes, this was the longest short film any of us have ever done by far, with a larger cast and a lot  more stuff to keep track of.  So our shooting schedule was 100 percent out of order.  Shooting non-linearly is always something you have to deal with, but this was the first time I'd dealt with anything this out of order.  It was a little unsettling.  My biggest concern was that there would be absolutely no emotional continuity when everything was cut together, but everything ended up working great.

Q:  How big was your crew?  Was commitment an issue for anyone?

A:    Our crew consisted of me, our cinematographer Luca Repola, our producer Kai Demler, and our assistant director and co-writer Cosmo Scharf.  Then we had two fantastic production assistants, Frida Perez and Emma Lov Block, who split the time during the week.  Everyone was fantastic.  I couldn't have asked for a better team to work with.  As far as commitment was concerned, we did have an original team member leave us, and one of our actors dropped out of the project a few months before we shot. But overall, everyone's enthusiasm and dedication was top-notch.

Q:    What do you hope happens with Monitor?  Do you have a distribution or marketing plan?  What's your expectation for the future?

A:    We just submitted Monitor to Tribeca Film Festival, so we'll see what happens with that!  If we're lucky, we'll have the honor of premiering the film at Tribeca.  If not, we'll try and get the film into as many festivals as possible, and then we'll probably put it online and maybe do a DVD sale.  We just want to get the film seen by as many people as possible.

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I hope you'll join us here at Team Celtx with wishing Jared & co. luck with Tribeca and their future productions.

Got your own "barbarians at the gates" story?  We want to hear 'em.  Shout out to Ryan and we'll chat about doing a profile on you too.

(Photos by Jared Rosenthal, used with permission.)

A Monk, a Scorpion & a Writer Walk into a Bar...

With compliments to the site www.egodialogues.com, I just came across a retelling of the parable of the monks and the scorpion.

It occurs to me that writers -- and artists in general -- can sympathize with the monk who gets stung by the scorpion.  Western culture marginalizes writers, creators & shapers of culture, and deify the myth of the "overnight success."  (You know, the 50 year-old writer who may have been shelving poorly-received manuscripts for 30 years until one finally gets traction.)

Why do we write?  The fame?  The money?  Pshaw.  It is our nature.  We want to tell good stories well.

Doors vs. Doorways

My new favourite podcast is 99% Invisible, hosted by Roman Mars.  It is, ostensibly, a podcast on design and architecture but I find its influence to be exceptionally mutable.

It invites me to recall a quote by James Caan in Christopher McQuarrie's criminally under-rated The Way of the Gun:  "Fifteen million dollars is not money. It's a motive with a universal adaptor."

Or, to paraphrase, story is not a bunch of things happening in order.  It's a framework for character with a universal adapter.

Okay, so my words are failing me as I try to give the inkling the weight it deserves.  Maybe today is not Metaphor Day.  Crap, I did it again.

How 'bout this:

Some things are actually spaces defined by that which surrounds them but are not the thigns that surround them.  The story of a constellation is not the stars -- it's the human-made connections among them that present a picture in a meaningful way that serves as a symbol of a human parable that uses gods as stand-ins for human passions.

A doorway is not the sides, threshold, lintel and swingy bit on hinges.  It's the space between.  This is probably most noticeable in comics and graphic novels.  The panels are static, like flashbulb pops in a darkened room.  The story happens between panels and in the gutter surrounding them.  When you read a comic, you're being served a story that happens in the interstitials and you make sense of it from the clues that happen in the panels.

I read once that still photographs are more effective at recalling memories because if you see Little Johnny standing at the end of the dock on water skis, you recall his apprehension, his try-and-fail-and-fail-and-finally-succeed moments, the smell of the lake and the warmth of the sun.  Video, on the other hand, helps you recall only the moments that are committed to motion and recorded.

Video is a door.  Photographs are doorways.

It's the before and the after, the memory and the confabulation that make up the story.

Easter Eggs & Narrative

I love Easter eggs.  Sure, the chocolate ones laid by bunnies are fine but I mean the kind that come hidden in media.

Cheat codes in video games were their own reward.  In the early 00's, I frequently tried every up/down/left/right D-pad combo using the arrows on my DVD player remote in the hope that something *hidden* would be revealed on one of the menu screens of a DVD.

(I give top marks to Fight Club, Dark City and Chicken Run.)

Easter eggs on CDs gave even more of a frisson because they illuminated some psychological element of the artist, as opposed to a DVD's marketing or graphic design team.  In my angry yoot past, I sat through a lot of silent "empty" tracks on albums like Tool's Undertow, Nine Inch Nail's Broken and Course of Empire's Initiation.  As Easter eggs go, those rewarded patience and a passive curiosity but not investigation as occurred the day I found out that if I pressed play on my CD of Songs in the Key of X and then immediately hit pause and scrubbed the rewind button back, the counter timecode of track 1 would sink to almost -10 minutes -- something not all players would let you do -- you would get to hear two additional tracks, one of which is "Time Jesum Transeuntum Et Non Riverentum" by Nick Cave & The Dirty Three.

These days, the proliferation of alternate reality games and transmedia has lowered the bar on how difficult it is to add additional layers of story to content.  Granted, most of it is still akin to the cereal box mazes of helping Luke find the droids, but there is also a lot of good stuff out there too.

So, dear guerrillas, is if you have more story than your web series, short video, etc. can handle, if you've got story slopping over the rim like a martini glass made out of narrative, then have you considered ways to add additional levels of story to your content in a way that rewards the behaviour of your ideal audience?

This can be simple.  Ensuring that any websites seen on screen in your video are actually live and owned by you as portals into the story.  Maybe take a page from AMC's Mad Men and give your characters anachronistic Twitter accounts.  Maybe you want to cater to the patience of the passive lean-back crowd and have an extra scene following the credits of your YouTube video.

We're starting to gear up for how we want to roll out Celtx Seeds Deux and one thing we have pinned down is we want to acknowledge and reward content creators who play with narrative like a potter makes cups of clay.  (Spot the Shakespeare in Love reference for a bonus point.)

What are your favourite Easter eggs?  Did you find a qualitative difference between the story-centric and marketing-centric ones?

 

Proud Moments in the History of Oral Storytelling

If you're not already a devoted fan of The Moth, then I highly encourage all and sundry to run-don't-walk to their site and subscribe to their podcast right now.  I'll wait.

...

Good.  You're welcome.

The Moth is about telling true stories told live without notes.  In commemoration of their 200th podcast, The Moth recently deviated from their traditional podcast of one or two extraordinary stories culled from around the US by posting the entire show from their first ever Chicago GrandSlam.

When the event was over, Peter Sagal, host of NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, recalled a story told to him by his friend Morgan from thirty years ago.

(If the friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend factor gives cause for concern on the anecdote's viability, park your inhibitions for a minute and remember that this is exactly how multi-generational oral storytelling works, whether it's the Disneyfication of parables, the Iliad or your holy text of choice.)

Peter Sagal recalled an occasion when his friend Morgan met Mother Theresa in the early '80s and apologized to Mother Theresa for working as a lowly dramaturg in New York instead of helping the masses in Calcutta.

Mother Theresa replied that in Calcutta, she is working to address a famine of the body.  Morgan, working in live theatre in America, is addressing a famine of the spirit.

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Writers don't write because it's glamourous.  Writers don't write because of the money.

You write because it's a vocation.  It's a calling.

Now go write.

Celtx & The Art of War

Every writer has their own peccadilloes for writing.  Maybe you need to wear your lucky socks.  Maybe you need three cups of coffee just to keep the shakes at bay.  You write standing up.  You write at stop lights.  You write exactly three hundred words and then stop, even in the middle of a sentence.

These are tactics.  These are not strategies.  Strategy would be plotting ahead vs. letting the script find itself.  Strategy is honing the theme and character to a laser's focus and then writing that theme on a paper which you tape to the top of the monitor.  Strategy is locking yourself in a motel room in Berlin and refusing to come out until the script is finished.

I have found it instructive, over the years, to take The Art of War, Sun Tzu's little treatise on the nature of warfare and use it as a metaphor with a universal translator for any environment where the situation is dire and I'm not willing to let succeess hinge on a steady supply of fourth-quarter come-from-behind miracles.

The entertainment & publishing industry is as hostile as you can get without being in an airless environment.  Even as democratization of tools and the elimination of gatekeepers have opened the floodgates for many who otherwise wouldn't have a chance, those open floodgates have also dramatically worsened the signal-to-noise ratio if you want your script/book/webseries/movie/comic book to get attention and attract an audience.

It's embedded in our very choice of words -- to wit:  uphill battle.

So, to keep this a blog post and not a new book of its own, here is one interpretation of The Art of War's 13 chapters translated into mediacreatorspeak.

Chapter 1:  Laying Plans -- Wherein the cunning writer sets writing goals that are as important as, say, caloric sustenance goals.  The Writer learns the rules of a format before cautiously breaking them.  The Writer prepares for the arduous campaign ahead.

Chapter 2:  Waging War -- Aim for a direction but let inspiration speak to you.  Permit the script to fuel itself.  During first draft, the Writer is in right-brain mode and is permitted to let the characters have the odd conversation without direction.  You can always kill them later.  The Writer's goal is to tell the damned story, not write a tome that doubles as ship ballast or write just to make sure the back of the book doesn't accidentally touch the front of the book.  Tell the story and be done with it.

Chapter 3:  Attack by Strategem -- The Writer does not need to send the script out into the world like a castaway asking for rescue via bottle.  Seed your market, update your word counts on your social networks, find a writer's group for feedback, learn how to pitch and write queries.

Chapter 4:  Tactical Dispositions -- Raise the stakes.  Paint your protagonist into a corner so tight you don't know how to get her out.  Invite dramatic conflict.  Escalate.  Force yourself to find a rhyme for orange.  If it's easy to write, it's boring to read.  Ideas are muscles -- work them and they get stronger.

Chapter 5:  Energy -- Creative vein mined out?  Jump to Act III or chapter 27.  Stop where you are and pick up from the plucky sidekick's throughline.  Come back to the main arc when you're fresh or right after you have that brilliant idea while you're in the shower.  Stay agile.  Every point in the story has a different perspective and different place in the structure.  Find a new one, keep writing.  The Writer can stitch it together later.  But keep writing.

Chapter 6:  Weak Points & Strong -- The Writer may have an encyclopedia knowledge of how the mail system works, have spent years wrestling with alcohol or drug addiction, or raised three children by herself.  Life plus imagination plus research gives you authority on a little, basic comprehension in some areas and gaping pits of ignorance in others.  Write the story you are the best-qualified to tell.

Chapter 7:  Manoeuvering -- This is where the Writer dons lucky socks, cracks his knuckles while the laptop boots up or takes that first noisy slurp of latte foam while reading yesterday's last page.  But if background noise drives you nuts, don't pose in a coffee shop.  The world is littered with the fantasies of writers who thought there was something romantic about writing in a coffee shop or a Montmartre absinthe bar in the 1890s.  The ghosts of literary greats do not judge you.  They want you to just write the damned story.  Just because you read that a writer you admire churns out 5000 words per day does not mean that will work for you.  Find what does, then do that.

Chapter 8:  Variations in Tactics -- Your 5:00-7:00am window of opportunity is being held hostage by your infant's sudden selfish interest in teething.  Try a new window of opportunity, like a lunch break.  A Writer may absent himself from an evening in front of the television for exactly 30 minutes to write as much as possible for those 30 minutes.  The savvy Writer does not rely on a lack of change in the Writer's life so much as a willingness to adapt to the inevitable changes in that Writer's life.

Chapter 9:  The Army on the March -- The long script is a marathon, not a sprint, and a single inciting premise cannot sustain a lengthy work.  A Writer may end in the middle of a sentence.  Some Writers purposely withhold the final paragraph of a chapter to better kick-start the next writing session or else they push on until they write the first paragraph of the next.  A slugline followed by half a paragraph of action disciplines the Writer to write with economy instead of wasting pages building up a head of steam on a fresh scene.

Chapter 10:  Terrain -- Know the structure of your format -- screen, stage, novel, etc. -- and ignore it or deviate from it with caution.  Turning points, plot reversals, A/B/C arcs, all have their needs to set up and conclude.  A Writer's characters either evolve or try to stand fast before irresistible forces but this change or lack of change must be shown over time.  Anticipate the dramatic conflicts of the characters and theme with regard to the format you are writing.  Index cards, real or virtual, are your friends.

Chapter 11:  The Nine Situations -- For the Writer, these situations are analogous to the Writer's mood and attitude.  The first ten pages of any new idea write themselves.  This is intoxicating and can lead to a hard drive full of ten-page long ideas for scripts.  The second half of Act II, on the other hand, is a death march.  The savvy writer anticipates the needs of the story and adapts accordingly.  If a Writer is struggling with a meandering plot and witless banter, perhaps it is time to write just five good sentences and call it a day.  Continue to write just five good sentences until you are over the peak and can see the finish line.  Close to the end?  Crying in sympathy with your characters' situation?  Beg your family's short-term pardon and write until you physically cannot continue.  Then write again tomorrow without sacrificing your subsequent goals.

Chapter 12:  The Attack By Fire -- Power to the people.  Until the software exists that taps directly into the Writer's noggin and creates the flesh made word, settle for tools that minimize the friction that must be overcome to get your story born into the world.  [Why, yes, we do think the Celtx ecology of desktop and mobile apps is ideal for this purpose, thank you!]

Chapter 13:  The Use of Spies -- There are things computers do better than people -- namely, complicated data-intensive calculations and repetitive drudgework.  Need to do research?  Get what you need from Wikipedia and double fact-check it later.  If you need a mental image of a character, hit Google Images to generate a few tens of thousands of hits, grab one and go.  This is much faster than wading through old yearbooks at your local library (even if you are writing in your local library) and speed is your friend.  Ideally, the Writer's fingers never the keyboard.  Surround yourself with the tools that are conducive to this goal.  It is also for this reason that a writing group is better than friends & family insofar as constructive feedback goes.  The Writer learns nothing from sycophants who want to make him happy except that he has friends and family who want to make him happy.

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Is this open to interpretation?  You betcha.  Even the original text is subject to revision and reassessment of context with regard to warfare, so its relevance to the generation of literary artworks is surely personal.  But there's meat on them thar bones, and even the staunchest pacifist can find value in studying this little book of suggestions for victory.

 

Common Questions from a Prospective User

Here at Casa de Celtx, we get a lot of questions from people considering switching to Celtx and want some assurance that our suite of products won't leave them vulnerable at a time they need it most.  We recently received an e-mail from a user who neatly summed up all his hesitations in list form and gave us a chance to respond to each in turn.

I'm reprinting both his questions and my answers below in case others may find themselves wondering the same thing.

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Q:  Do I have to rent a studio to use Celtx?

A.  Not at all!  Celtx Desktop is free to download and use from celtx.com.   You can expand upon its functionality through the purchase of additional add-ons or leave it as-is with no penalty.

Q:  Can I load a pre-written script into Celtx, or must I re-type it from scratch?

A:  You can import a script in .TXT format or sync a script directly from an iPhone or iPad that has the Celtx Script app.  Depending upon the software used to export your script as a TXT file, you may have a little formatting clean-up to do once it's been imported.

Q:  Can I save my results on my own system, If I don't have a desire to share it with others through a studio?

A:  Absolutely!  The only time you need to have an online connection is when you run Typeset, the pagination engine included in Celtx Desktop that communicates with our servers to ensure your script is formatted correctly for printing or saving to PDF.  Your script is securely parsed by Typeset and sent back to you in industry-standard format.  No copy is left on our servers.

Q:  The use of Celtx is promoted as a free tool, but the user's manual suggests that I have to use a studio which is not free. Is this a paradox or do I misunderstand how I can use Celtx?

A:  Yep, just a misunderstanding.  Celtx Studio is of benefit to many writers for the off-site security it provides, especially if the writer (a) frequently works from several computers and/or (b) needs to collaborate with others.  You are under no obligation to buy Celtx Studio to use Celtx Desktop for free.

Q:  I have been published often as a writer and magazine columnist and have written five books. As I have written only one screen play, can I use Celtx for just that one project? This is why I have these questions about a studio. It seems to me that the studio is for someone with fifty projects and is about to lose control of them and can't remember what he is doing with them. This doesn't describe me.

A:  We encourage writers and content creators of all stripes to find the environment that best serves their needs and work hard to modestly propose that Celtx is that solution.  You certainly don't need to worry about lock-in.  Quite the opposite, in fact -- knowing you and other members of our community have a growing spectrum of options keeps us hungry to earn your loyalty.  (Since we live and die on goodwill, we're all big fans of carrots instead of sticks here at Chez Celtx.)

Think of Celtx as an ecosystem for content creators.  The free Celtx Desktop lets you commit to an industry-standard format in screenplays, stageplays (US & international), AV two-column, audio play, comic books and novels.  If you're a pro, you might find value in augmenting your performance with our Super Bundle, Writer's Pack or the specific add-on that meets your particular needs.  If you're frequently on the go and have an iPhone or iPad, you can purchase Celtx Script for writing or Celtx Shots for visually setting up your scenes.  Finally, if you want the security of off-site back-up and/or collaboration with a team, then Celtx Studio can be purchased as well.

99¢ Sale: Celtx Mobile Apps

Unleash the hounds of creativity!  For 4 days only - Black Friday until Cyber Monday - Celtx apps are just 99¢ in the App Store.

Celtx Shots for iPad/iPhone

Create storyboards and block scenes in the field, on the set, or anywhere, anytime inspiration strikes.

 

 

 

Celtx Script for iPad/iPhone

Capture your next brilliant line of dialog before it becomes a fleeting thought. Write with the #1 rated scriptwriting app.