SCREENWRITING: FINAL DRAFT

We started by speaking about moments. If you think of a moment, remember your first reactions to it. Remember what it did for you when you first wrote it. Although many drafts could get you questioning your moments, remember them and trust your first reactions.

Final draft
Every script has to be in written in the default font for to it be viewed by anyone. Final Draft is also the industry standard. No Producer, Director, Commissioner, Agent or Actor will read your script unless it has been written in Final Draft. Final Draft also works along with Movie Magic and you feed your script into that and it will produce the shooting script for the production.
Final Draft has many tools to help a writer like:
- Spelling - Press this 3 or 4 times after finishing the script and it'll check all the spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc.
- General - This doesn't need to be altered and will show you the layout of the script.
- Set font - DO NOT CHANGE THE FONT.
- Documents allows you to add script notes, a title page, etc.
- Production - Here you can see how many scenes you have by clicking "scene numbers"
- Lock page is what you do when the script is finished. If the script needs editing the edited scripts are given to the actors on coloured paper to be able to track the edits

We were then given a 5 page word document which Steve asked us to put into Final Draft and reformat it so that it looked more like a script. Since I've already used Celtx in the past I decided to use Final Draft and learn to use the software.

I found the software quite straight forward to use and understood the layout as I've written scripts before. Steve showed us how to use the software and format the correct bits and from this session I also learnt the importance of re-reading and spell checking a script. After going through the entire script and double checking everything I noticed that there were some spelling errors in the script but these were actually intentional and Steve explained that here could be a good place to add in a script note to ensure this is not only noted but remembered as well.