Story Development

What is documentary filmmaking? Put simply, it’s the act of scripting and filming true stories. To learn more, watch the recording of our webinar with special guest panelists Gillian Fritzsche and Ikhwan Rivai for a discussion and Q&A session.

Join us on Wednesday, December 2nd, at 12:30pm EST (9:30am PST; 5:30pm GMT) for a conversation with award-winning writer, director and producer Gillian Fritzsche on a Beginner’s Guide to Story Structure. Gillian has worked with such industry giants at Jane Lynch and has directed films for the NY Shakespeare Exchange, and has experience with shorts, feature-length films, documentary films, and much more.

Don’t want to tear yourself away from your script? Improved Index Cards allow you to quickly create, review, and edit your index cards directly within your script editor so you can access and manage your ideas in a single creative workspace.

In this article, our friends at MADSTUDIOS will show you how to use your settings to better conceptualize your story.

At last, it’s time to take all of your story development and outlining work and turn it into that elusive, seemingly impossible goal: a completed first draft of an original script. In this Learning Series lesson, we’ll show you how.

Planning out your plot will make writing your script a lot easier. In Lesson #4, we’ll guide you through creating a thorough Script Outline – and show you how Celtx can speed up the process dramatically.

Your characters are the most important aspect of your script. For them to be engaging and believable, you’ll have to spend some time with them before going to the page. In Lesson #3 of the Learning Series, we’ll show you how to develop your characters by asking them questions.

What is your story going to say? How is it going to say it? In Lesson #2, you’ll learn how to ground your script by defining your dramatic targets.

What’s in a logline? Well, everything. In this first lesson of the Celtx Learning Series, we’ll show you how to get your scriptwriting process started by distilling your story idea.

In this guest post, professional script reader Alex Bloom offers an insider’s perspective on what people will be looking for when they take your screenplay under consideration. Want to know how to make sure your spec survives the first cut? Read on to find out.