Documentary

I'm now looking for links and resources for documentary film and television productions, and especially their scripts. For those new to this form of film production, I'd like to suggest some unusual documentaries that gathered some attention recently: The Corporation, Supersize Me and especially What the Bleep Do We Know? Each has a web site.

Industry Choice for Script Writing Software?

My students have the choice of two installed script writing software packages: Scriptware (Windows 95 edition?) and Final Draft v. 6. I want the students use what is most popular in the industry. According to http://www.nextpix.com/v1_1/resources/software.html (accessed 17 June 2005):

Screenplay Systems is the Vertical Integration leader in the industry with their "Movie Magic" suite of products which include Screenwriting, Script Breakdown, Scheduling, and Budgeting.

However "Final Draft" is at this point considered to be the industry leader in straight screenwriting, and now includes the previously separate standalone program "3x5" which was by itself a powerful "virtual corkboard" brainstorming/mindmapping/outlining program, which has now been folded in as the "Scene Navigator" function mentioned below in the Final Draft description section.

Any comments from the reel, whoops! "real" world? While I'm at it, does anyone know of any "home made" tutorials for Final Draft?

Radio Scripts

Today I am adding radio scripts to this blog, their links are posted. Note that the good ol' BBC has lots of scripts for downloading, but they don't conform 100% with the U.S. versions. Update: I changed colors for this blog to be more environmentally friendly and blogger.com punished me by shxx-canning all, ALL, the links. What would Orsen Wells say? Is this a bug or a feature, blogger.com?

Writing Treatments

What the heck is a treatment, anyway, and why do I need to worry about them? Great questions I remember asking when I was a poor white boy growing up in the strawberry fields of Ohio. I'm delighted to say there are a plethora of web sites written by professional scriptwriters that address treatments, and I have included some links on this blog.

For those folks who want a great research tip, you can find a great site (say a script treatment site) and then find sites that link to it. For example, Alta Vista allows you to type link:greatwebsite.com where greatwebsite.com is an actual URL to a working web site (click and see what is found for links to http://www.simplyscripts.com/treatments.html).

Writing for Electronic Media

How has writing for electronic media changed in the last 25 years? I'm anxious to hear others' thoughts on this subject so that I can pass them along to my students. The most obvious change is the need to write for the web, especially for historically print-based media. Does this mean writing for television has changed less? It seems logical, but I'd rather hear from practitioners.

I'll be adding links of interest to my students, and I will be delighted to hear from anyone who has information about great scriptwriting sites.