Celtx Studio or Adobe Story?

As Adobe gallop ahead of Apple with CS5, Adobe's Story is worth looking at. Here is Adobe's introductory video.

I have been using Celtx for a number of years now with students and for my own work. It's been really useful, robust and simple to use. The software has been steadily updated over the years - the last addition of a sketching facility was especially welcome. Celtx also offers a collaborative function called 'Celtx Studio'. This is a paid for service that allows an administrator to set up 'seats' so that collaborators have an individual log in. Then Celtx projects can be worked on by the group, with changes noted and tracked. Updates are saved to the 'Studio. I have been working with 4 students like this for about 4 months. There is a useful chat function so that communication is separate from the writing. All the writing is displayed with the usual industry standard formatting. This makes it more practical under most circumstances for screenplay writing that the excellent EtherPad. Importantly for me Celtx also include a whole suit of planning and tagging for schedules, locations, prop lists etc to help with the production planning.

'Story' from Adobe is an AIR powered application. You will need to have an Adobe Log in here. Once you have logged in and opened Story in your browser you can install the desktop application. I strongly suggest you do. The ability to work offline is very handy. You can sync it later with the online versions of the projests. In fact switching from on to off line is easier than I found with Celtx.

First impressions are excellent. Story looks great. Anyone familiar with Buzzword, Acrobat.com or Photoshop.com will feel at home in the Adobe style environment. Naturally Story is designed to integrate with a future releases of the Adobe production premium suite including the latest CS5.



Adobe have seen the value of metadata and activly worked out how control of such data can be embedded into the production process. Imagine loading a QuickTime movie and being able to search for a line of dialogue, location or character.




Celtx will allow you to paste text into it. This text will then require formatting - which is quite quickly done with the application. Story will permit Importing a script as text or from Word or Final Draft etc. But since Adobe owns of the PDF format it's not surprising that it also allows PDF import. Not only that but the script is broken down on import. That's really impressive. If you find a script online you can now import it and then edit it with all the formatting preserved and generate all the production reports you need. (For some reason it fails to identify the title page.) It doesn't embrace the production functions of Celtx, staying focused on the script. So it lacks the production tools that Celtx provides. eg calendar/scheduler, storyboarder, sketcher etc but at least for the short term it has plenty to offer.

Where is does better, immediately, is that you can collaborate without charge. All collaborators need Adobe IDs and you just share your project with them. Privileges can be set by the administrator, very easily. I expect to use both together since there are few script changes on the short films I work on once into production.

The Photographer's eye by John Szarkowski.

Photographic gems from 'The Photographer's Eye'.  Published in 1980 and still valid!

I recently read Mark Galer's book Digital photography in available light.  It's an excellent book and one that manages to offer new instruction in a market full of other books on the same subject.  In the book he quotes from John Szarkowski's book 'The Photographer's eye'.  As luck would have it the University's library has a copy of this, much older book, on it's shelves too.

The book is a fantastic collection of photos from the early days of the art to the 1960's.  There are few words, instead the images are left to speak for themselves.  They are artfully arranged so that they relate to each other.  The words that are included are understated and insightful, contrasting painting with photography.  There is plenty to think about. 

The book attempts to describe the nature of photography - it's relationship to reality.  The role of the 'significant detail' and of symbol over painterly narrative.  It explores the importance of the frame, it's ability to define content, create relationship, present juxtapositions and quote out of context.  It raises the fundermental Photographer's question - What should be included what should be excluded?  He proceeds to sum it up beautifully;

"This frame is the beginning of his picture's geometry.  It is to the photograph as the cushion is to the billard table."

He then unpicks the relationship of photography to time and the 'decisive moment' (Cartier - Bresson).  In order to impose some meaning on an image, to make it a picture, the Photographer is obliged to arrange the elements by moving the camera.  The issue of vantage point is therefore raised.  All the while the points made are illustrated with a great selection of photos.

See more images at JPG magazine.

web 2.0

I have been working with mind mapping apps recently. Here's a map of many of the web 2.0 apps I use. I haven't added all the notes to explain each entry but I guess you can figure it out. There's a mac bias. Sorry. I try to pick cross platform and free apps and services where possible. This was made with Xminds free application. It was neat and quick to use. You can figure it out quite easily. The export options are limited on the free version. Here's the result.



There's a lot of stuff here! Enjoy, see you next year.

Mike J

(I've had to correct the embed code and still can't get the bottom of the player to show. Click bottom right to enlarge the viewer. Mmmm the hyperlinks don't work. I am not impressed.)

pps. OK perhaps this will be better. I have uploaded the file produced by Xmind in mm format to Mind42 and published it. Here's it embedded.



That looks slightly better and the links seem to work.

With web 2.0 there are a huge range of tool to help you work. I have been investigating some recently to help creative collaboration. Here are a few ideas:

Brainstorming -

1. Mind42 (mind maps)
2. Mindmeister (mind maps - incl iApp (£))
3. Xmind (downloadable app for mind maps)
   
4. Prezi This is a web app designed as an alternative to Powerpoints and the domination of bulleted lists. Might be good for outlining ideas, pitching stories etc.
   

Collaboration -
(real time)

1. Etherpad (Google has recently acquired this technology and the future of the free service is not clear).
2. Google Docs, either presentations or documents.
   
3. Facebook, for groups and communication
   
4. Celtx studio. I have a test account.
   
5. Acrobat.com has 'buzzword' for documents and presentations too. Slicker than Google Presentations. But only embeds pdfs like Google (so not documents).
6. iPaper embeddable documents!! Really aiming as a way of publishing. Works in VLE like Blackboard/Minerva.
   
7. Evernote Its possible to share research through their note sharing facility. iPhone app, Firefox add-on, downloadable application. Here is a shared notebook. I can add research so all can see. But others can only read it. It is an easy and very quick way of gathering and sharing material. But its one sided. Creating a generic account might be one way around this. But you could share a 'look book' or scrap book for filmmaking etc
   

Distribution (cross platform)

Dropbox (Docs and PDFs work well but text files don't on my iPhone) Optional download App that lives in the Mac Finder window. Really neat idea. You can share items from your dropbox. Last year this seemed very slow, but it seems to work better now.

box.net - free 1GB up to 25MB file size.

The future will be strongly influenced by Google Wave. Its buggy and in beta now. I've messed around with it alittle. One to watch next year.

regards, Mike J